Data are from the 2013 National Health and Wellness Survey, a large (n = 75,000) internet panel survey designed to approximate the adult U.S. population.
I myself will be covering the "Your Brain on the Internet" panel, which will astonishingly bring together Nicholson Baker and Jaron Lanier, on Sunday afternoon.
(We thank Hare for elucidating this point via email). The respondents in this pilot study were drawn from YouGov's opt-in Internet panel.
But most recent results and polls suggest a collapse in Lib Dem popularity – with the British Election Study internet panel survey showing a steep fall in Liberal Democrat support from 44% in 2010 to 13% in 2014.
Further, the kind of people who find the time to answer questions from a stranger calling their home, or who join an internet panel, will not be representative of the public as a whole.
Instead of relying on the sorts of people who can be persuaded to pick up a landline telephone or put themselves forward for an internet panel, the BES survey knocked on doors selected by a genuinely random sampling.
The New Yorker is already all over this program: James Surowiecki wrote about it in his piece on procrastination in this week's issue, and last week, at the "Your Brain on the Internet" panel during our festival, Daniel Zalewski, our features editor, confirmed that at least one of our staff writers uses the program.
Mori and Populus phone people, YouGov use an internet panel, and I believe some of the cheaper outfits prefer throwing a spanner in the street and then getting the lunk it takes out to put his finger on one of three colours when he wakes up in casualty.
Interview method: Internet panel.
Participants were recruited from a probability-based internet panel (KnowledgePanel®) managed by GfK Knowledge Networks, a survey research firm.
Although we used a probability-based internet panel to recruit our respondents, the response rate was just over 60%.
