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Attrition poses an important challenge for panel surveys. With respect to these surveys, respondents’ decisions about whether to participate in reinterviews are affected by their participation in prior waves of the panel. However, in self-administered mixed-mode panels, the way of experiencing a survey differs between the mail mode and the web mode. Consequently, this study investigated how respondents’ prior experience with the characteristics of a survey—such as length, difficulty, interestingness, sensitivity, and the diversity of the questionnaire—affects their informed decision about whether to participate again or not. We found that the length of a questionnaire seems to be of such importance to respondents that they base their participation on this characteristic, regardless of the mode. Our findings also suggest that the difficulty and diversity of questionnaires are readily accessible information that respondents use in the mail mode when making a decision about whether to participate again, whereas these characteristics have no effect in the web mode. In addition, privacy concerns have an impact in the web mode but not in the mail mode.

As more and more people use social media to communicate their view and perception of elections, researchers have increasingly been collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms. Our research focuses on social media communication related to the 2013 election of the German parliament [translation: Bundestagswahl 2013]. We constructed several social media datasets using data from Facebook and Twitter. First, we identified the most relevant candidates (n=2,346) and checked whether they maintained social media accounts. The Facebook data was collected in November 2013 for the period of January 2009 to October 2013. On Facebook we identified 1,408 Facebook walls containing approximately 469,000 posts. Twitter data was collected between June and December 2013 finishing with the constitution of the government. On Twitter we identified 1,009 candidates and 76 other agents, for example, journalists. We estimated the number of relevant tweets to exceed eight million for the period from July 27 to September 27 alone. In this document we summarize past research in the literature, discuss possibilities for research with our data set, explain the data collection procedures, and provide a description of the data and a discussion of issues for archiving and dissemination of social media data.