Do We Hear Different Voices?: Investigating the Differences Between Internet and non-Internet Users On Attitudes and Behaviors

Even before the internet became popular among the public, researchers had identified the potential problems involved in using a web-based data collection method for survey re-search. Of the two types of web panels, probability-based panels are generally believed to produce data of higher quality than those from non-probability panels. The latter is prone to sampling coverage error: In only 71 % of American households, at least one member uses the internet at any location (including at home), and only 62 % of house-holds have an internet connection from home, as of October of 2007. Moreover, some subgroups of the population such as African Americans and Latinos are more likely to be offline than others. This phenomenon is often referred to as the “digital divide. ” Recent data suggests that this divide may not be closing quickly enough to be dismissed by re-searchers seeking to study a representative sample of the population. As a solution, Knowledge Networks covers the ISP charges and provided MSN ® TV web units in the past and now PC laptop computers to its panelists (i.e., KnowledgePanel ® members) who live in a household without internet access, thus closing the digital divide gap. As