The University of Helsinki Citizen Barometer is an online panel for Finnish citizens, which will function as an infrastructure for surveys and survey experimental designs for researchers at the University of Helsinki. Over the last year and a half Åsa von Schoultz, Professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki, has together with her team in political science and HSSH worked to establish the panel.
The barometer will work as an infrastructure for behavioral research with surveys on people’s thoughts, opinions, and behaviors.
“As a political scientist I generally think of political attitudes, behaviors, and reactions to society, but it might be other things as well. It is up to the researchers to define what this infrastructure should be used for,” Åsa says.
Behind the scenes, there is an experienced group of people who can manage the survey research process. There is also a program, Qualtrics, for building the surveys.
“I'm working with a great group of people who can manage the whole process, setting up surveys, recruiting people, reaching out to them, sending links to our surveys and keeping track of those responding. We are also building the survey so it looks nice and makes sense for people answering the questions.”
The Citizen Barometer is a pre-recruited group of people who can be easily reached for survey research. The goal has been to collect a large panel of Finnish citizens representative of the general population. Background variables of the panelists are collected at time of recruitment which will reduce the number of questions in each survey and time required to respond to questions.
“So why do we need online panels? I would say that it's valuable because it provides us with a unique opportunity to follow people over time. We can study how attitudes and behaviors change over time. It allows us to see how things develop along the course of a lifetime,” Åsa says.
The panel was built in the winter of 2022–2023 with a first round of recruitments funded by HSSH. The main recruitment process was a random selection of 25 000 Finnish people aged 18–80 with a response rate of close to 14%.
“I would say this is a good response rate for an online panel.”
Another round of recruitments was done as an opt-in possibility via Voting Advice Applications from Helsingin Sanomat and YLE. There are approximately 2800 individuals signed up from the random recruitment and 4700 from the VAA opt-ins. These two groups are kept apart and can be used for different purposes.
The next steps for the Citizen Barometer are institutionalizing the management of the infrastructure, having an open call for researchers for survey questions and increasing the visibility of the panel.
Visit the Citizen Barometer website here: http://www.kansalaisbarometri.fi (the website is in Finnish and Swedish)