General Seminar in Politics and Government - Matto Mildenberger, UC Santa Barbara

Title: Survey Sampling in the Global South Using Facebook Advertisements

Survey research in the Global South has traditionally required large budgets and lengthy fieldwork to conduct face-to-face surveys with respondents. The recent expansion of global digital connectivity, including mobile phone and internet access, presents an opportunity for researchers to cost-effectively engage more diverse subject pools and study settings where in-person contact is challenging.

This paper evaluates whether Facebook advertisements can be used to cost-effectively generate diverse survey samples in the Global South.  We extend the Total Survey Error framework for evaluating survey quality to Facebook survey samples, highlighting key trade-offs for researchers considering the platform. Using Facebook advertisements, we quota-sample respondents in three countries, Mexico (n=5,168), Kenya (n=1,530), and Indonesia (n=2,997), to evaluate how well these samples perform on a range of survey indicators related to both internal and external validity.

We find that while the Facebook platform can quickly and cheaply recruit respondents, these samples tend to be more male, more educated, and more urban than the overall national populations. Applying post-stratification weighting ameliorates but does not fully overcome these initial sample imbalances. Even as quota-sampled surveys remain lower quality than gold-standard in-person surveys, the method generates comparable quality data to a commercial online sample from a professional survey firm. Additionally, we are able to replicate universal behavioral biases from a canonical Prospect Theory experiment  in these samplesMoreover the average cost per completed survey across our three Facebook samples is $1.05, inclusive of incentives, compared to $5.75 from the professional survey firm. Our analysis demonstrates the potential of Facebook advertisements to cost-effectively conduct research in diverse settings, expanding the empirical range and sample diversity of social science public opinion scholarship.

Matto Mildenberger is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science, UC Santa Barbara. His research explores the political drivers of policy inaction in the face of serious social and economic threats posed by global climate change. Straddling comparative political economy and political behavior, Mildenberger's work focusses on comparative climate policymaking and the dynamics of US climate opinion. His current book project compares the politics of carbon pricing across advanced economies, with a focus on the history of climate reforms in Australia, Norway and the United States. Other ongoing work explores public environmental behaviors, political ideology, and the relationship between economic and environmental policy preferences. A previous book, Dependent America? How Mexico and Canada Construct US Power (Toronto 2011, with Stephen Clarkson), explored the political economy of North American trade and security relationships.