Dear Suzanne,

Of course we will have a paperless office - just a few more forms to sign before it will be delivered.... I think that in practice people have a variety of valid concerns and varying levels of comfort with technology. So both researchers and participants need to have a high enough level of comfort before the transition will be complete. However, I suspect that it is pretty close to occuring. The rise of various companies offering research services have already made it pretty easy to handle most of the concerns of hosting the data; the ubiquity of cell phones in some contexts means that participants have already enough technology to fill out any forms they wish.

When I look at the suggested link I think that there is a little too much emphasis on recreating the paper world. Anonyminity is relatively easier to establish in the online world. There are some concerns with data protection, but they are not overwhelmingly more complicated than forgetting to lock my office cabinet each night. When I really think about technologically enabled data collection I think that static questionnaires are just about the last thing I would re-create in a wired world. Not only should the context be customisable and inclusive (ratings can be replaced by photographs, recordings, etc when needed) but the timing itself should be made to fit. Someone can fill out an ongoing survey that bridges the gap between ESM and our current static forms. We can even collect data from units (families; workgroups etc) that currently don't fit the way things work today.

So .. what problems. I think that once you deal with basic data hygiene and the learning curve associated with new tools, the biggest thing to consider is how you will interpret results from people with whom you have progressively less contact. An example: when you ask how do you do... the answer may reflect an evaluation of state or politeness. In person when can properly judge how a question is interpreted. On a questionnaire we often have problems. But a questionnaire going to someone in the population whom you have not met and have no other information about may be very easily misinterpreted.

Cheers.

I participated in what was probably the first really large scale scientifically sampled web-based survey (see below), which was only possible at the time because it was of engineering students on university campuses. It did feel very different at the time, but the technology enabled us to send more reminders at less cost and to save the cost of data entry in exchange for extravagant programming and IT costs compared to now. Now well more than a decade after the last of those surveys went out, web-based collection is almost the rule and we have moved on to smart phones and other devices and I am hardly concerned about the differences from pencil and paper; in fact, the technology enables much better customization, such as skip patterns we would have never attempted in self-administered paper questionnaires.

What I think we shouldn't lose sight of is the possible advantage of the power of a true face-to-face interview in the hands of a properly trained researcher or clinician, who themselves can be assisted by a piece of technology that can administer skip patterns, cue with the proper gender of spouses, numbers of children and the like. There has always been a place for the added attention of an interview and the technology to replace it is not out there yet. I am not saying that there isn't a middle ground along the lines of a Skype conversation, but that is still two human beings interacting. But in the many years since we first administered our surveys of female engineering students (see Final Report of the Women's Experiences in College Engineering (WECE) Project on my profile), I have come to fully accept electronic surveys and remember data entry with a bit of horror.