A UK web-based probability panel? Exploring the issues, opportunities and design considerations.

该项目将研究英国经济和社会研究委员会（英国经济和社会科学研究的主要资助者）是否应该在英国资助一个新的主要研究小组。这个想法是招募大量的人（“小组”），代表英国人口，并要求他们定期在互联网上填写调查问卷。问卷将涵盖许多不同的主题，想要了解特定主题的研究人员可以要求将他们的问题包括在内。这将意味着许多没有时间或金钱来建立自己的研究的研究人员将能够迅速得到他们感兴趣的问题的答案，而且由于该小组已经建立并使用互联网，这也将相对便宜。这个项目的目的是看看它是否是一个好主意，建立这样一个小组，如何最好地做到这一点，以及它将花费多少。我们将与大学、政府和志愿部门的研究人员讨论他们是否会使用它，他们可能会用它来做什么，以及为了满足他们的需求，它需要是什么样的。我们还将查看其他国家类似的小组是如何运作的，谁在使用它们，并查看有关ESRC目前资助的研究类型的信息，以确定其中是否有人可以使用新的互联网小组。我们还将研究如何最好地设计这样一个小组，包括如何确定参与的人，以及如何鼓励他们回答调查。同样，为了做到这一点，我们会和可能使用它的研究人员交谈，看看类似的面板是如何设计和运行的。他们的想法是，这样一个小组可能意味着英国社会科学家能够做同样多（或更多）的高质量研究，但花费更少的钱。这将意味着英国纳税人的钱得到了更有效的利用。

This project will look at whether the Economic and Social Research Council, which is a major funder of economic and social science research in the UK, should fund a major new research panel in the UK. The idea is recruit a large number of people (the 'panel'), representative of the UK population, and ask them to fill in questionnaires regularly over the internet. The questionnaires would cover lots of different topics, and researchers who wanted to know about a particular topic could ask for their questions to be included. This would mean that lots of researchers who don't have the time or money to set-up their own study would be able to get answers to the questions they are interested in quickly, and because the panel is already set-up and uses the internet, this would be relatively cheap too. The purpose of this project is to look at whether it is a good idea to set-up such a panel, how best to do this and how much it would cost. We will speak to researchers in universities, government and the voluntary sector about whether they would use it, what they might use it for and what it would need to be like in order to meet their needs. We would also look at how similar panels in other countries are run and who uses them, and look at information about what kinds of studies the ESRC funds at the moment, to work out whether any of them could use the new internet panel instead. We will also look into how best to design such a panel, including how to identify the people to take part and how to encourage them to answer the surveys. Again, to do this we would speak to researchers who might use it, and look at how similar panels are designed and run. The idea is that a panel like this could mean that UK social scientists are able to do as much (or more) high-quality research, but for less money. This would mean that UK taxpayers' money is used more efficiently and effectively.