Scientific Presentations
LabTalks@DCD
Department of Digital and Computational Demography
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), Rostock, Germany, February 26, 2025
11:00 AM: Talk with Jessica Donzowa - Exploring Social Media recruitment for Survey Research: Innovations, Challenges, and Quality Considerations
Abstract
Over the past decade, social media advertising has become a widely used tool for survey recruitment, offering flexibility and speed - especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, data quality concerns, including sampling bias, non-response, and coverage error, remain underexplored. The Total Survey Error (TSE) framework provides a systematic approach to examining these issues. In this talk, I aim to conceptualize my five dissertation projects within the TSE framework, addressing different sources of error in social media-based survey research. Two completed studies examine self-selection bias and topic salience in recruitment ads and how ad design affects response quality. Two ongoing projects assess network reporting for fertility estimation in low- and middle-income countries and data quality in Facebook surveys in Senegal. Finally, I present an early-stage idea on how platform choice affects survey responses, highlighting the need for cross-platform comparability for social media recruitment. By integrating these projects within the TSE framework, this talk provides a first step towards a comprehensive understanding of survey error in social media recruitment and offers insights for improving data quality in future studies.
Bio: Jessica Donzowa is a doctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Bielefeld University. She has a background in sociology, media studies and demography. Her research focuses on data quality of online surveys using social media recruitment and new survey reporting approaches to estimating demographic outcomes in low- and middle-income countries.
Online Seminar Talk, February, 12th from 11:00 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Rostock time)