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The BBC Internet Study: General Methodology

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Abstract

This article provides an overview of a large-scale web-based survey, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), designed to investigate sex differences. I describe the background and challenges inherent to Web-based testing, the history and rationale behind this study, the design and implementation, and ethical and methodological considerations in the research design. I also discuss the kinds of data collected from around 255,000 participants, describe basic demographic information about the BBC sample, and examine reliability and validity, both internally and in comparison with other similar studies. I conclude that the dataset was largely reliable, and merits the analyses described later in this special section.

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Acknowledgements

The BBC committed a large number of “people hours” and a significant amount of money to implement this Internet survey, and those of us who have had the opportunity to contribute to the study and to use the data are collectively grateful to all those at the BBC who commissioned the project, supported its scientific goals, and who carried out the time-consuming work of actually implementing and testing the Internet survey. To mention a few by name, we are particularly grateful to Sara Woodford, series producer of Secrets of the Sexes, who took the decision to run a large-scale survey, and who allowed funding for the survey to come from the program budget. Special thanks also to Michael Mosley, executive producer of the TV series, Caragh Salisbury, who managed the Web-design project over several months, and to all the others at the BBC involved in designing, overseeing, and implementing the survey, in particular, Pete Harvey, Stephen Mather, and Matt Shearer. We hope that this example of productive collaboration between scientific researchers and the BBC will encourage similar projects in the future.

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Correspondence to Stian Reimers.

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

  Full question set from the BBC Internet Study

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Reimers, S. The BBC Internet Study: General Methodology. Arch Sex Behav 36, 147–161 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-006-9143-2

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