Comparison of the results of online and offline surveys in the study of the attitudes of youth to interethnic relations

Abstract

The paper presents the experience of comparing the results of online and offline surveys conducted by the authors within the study of the Krasnoyarsk Krai youth attitudes to national issues using a single methodology in 2021. The samples of online and offline surveys are reduced to a fully identical structure using a weighting procedure based on socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, age, and locality. Consequently, the authors conclude that the presence or absence of differences in the responses of online and offline samples is significantly influenced by the wording of the questions, in particular, the presence or absence in the question of reference to the personal emotional evaluation of the respondent. Questions that involve revealing the respondent’s personal emotional attitude to a phenomenon or process give statistically significant shifts toward more socially desirable evaluations. On the contrary, the questions aimed at measuring the respondent’s external evaluation of a phenomenon or process do not show statistically significant differences in the answers.