摘要：For many years, Business Tendency Surveys on the basis of mailing suffer from an
erosion of the response rate. To counter this problem, there are traditional methods as
limitation of the number of questions, improvement of the design of the questionnaire,
intensified recalls by mail or telephone, more attractive outputs and a time-reduction of
the delivery of the results. Another way to stop the reduction of the response rate is to
offer different modes of surveys. Therefore, the KOF introduced an online survey in
addition to the mail survey.
Up to now, there are only few research projects which analysed the effects of the new
technique of the online survey on the response rate and the quality of the responses.
First studies indicate that mail surveys produce higher response rates than internet
surveys. Our results show a big difference in the unit non-response rate too.
Differentiating according to language regions, branches, size of firms and by the
percentage of exports on sales does not change the picture.
If there is a different behaviour of firms between the two modes this could be reflected not
only on the response rate but also on the selection of the response category. This would
have a significant draw-back for the survey results and their interpretation. The results
show at least in the case of "Total manufacturing industry" that the differences between
the two modes can be neglected.
The results of business tendency surveys are rarely used on a micro level. The
internationally common aggregation technique is the balance method. We therefore
analysed the effect of the differences of the two survey modes on the balance indicators.
The examination had to be restricted to the monthly survey in manufacturing industry.
Thirteen out of fifteen questions have equal means in the two survey modes.
关键词：survey mode, unit-non-response, item-non-response, ordinal
measures of association, business tendency survey
