Glossary

Representative Online Weighting (ROW)

The concept of ROW was developed in order to adjust the typical issues of representativeness and distortion in results that are linked to online market research:

• the majority of Germany’s population do not have access to the Internet and
• a controlled selection process to participate in online surveys does not exist.

For this reason a representative offline survey is conducted before doing the online survey. Based on the offline survey the probability of certain population groups to have access to the Internet is determined. According to this probability the data of participants in the online survey are statistically weighted.

In addition the distribution of demographic characteristics that were found in the online survey is adjusted to the representative offline survey. By carrying out those weightings and adjustments both above-mentioned effects of distortion are compensated.