The NHK Broadcasting Culture Research Institute has been studying the potential of the survey method “postal-request and web-collection method (hereinafter called “web method”) that sends survey request by mail to respondents randomly selected from the Basic Resident Registers and asks them to respond online via website or app. In 2016, the web method was experimentally incorporated in “The Rating Survey on Young Children’s TV Viewing” that had been conducted annually since 1996 (except for 2004) only by mail survey method. The 2018 survey was the third survey using web method, whose response rate was 56.1%, which turned out to be higher than that of the mail method (53.1%).
Our research team held a workshop at the NHK BUNKEN FORUM 2019 and reported the web survey project of “The Rating Survey on Young Children’s TV Viewing”, which was followed by a roundtable discussion on measures to sustain and improve response rates and the potential of public opinion surveys that collect responses via web browser or survey app. The floor showed a keen interest in field research of web method and the tendencies of survey data. The guest speaker, Yasushi Sato (Nikkei Research Inc.) said it was significant that the web method could access people whose responses had not been collected by conventional mail method and pointed out it would be imperative to further analyze the factors contributing to the difference in survey results of web and mail methods.