Online Surveys and Digital Demography in the Developing World: Facebook Users in Kenya

TL;DR

This study explores the use of Facebook's advertising platform to conduct online surveys in Kenya, assessing its effectiveness for digital demography research in the developing world.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of using Facebook for online surveys in Kenya and compares online respondent data with traditional survey sources.

Findings

Facebook audience estimates align reasonably with census data

Online respondents differ from Afrobarometer survey participants

Pilot survey results provide initial insights into digital demography in Kenya

Abstract

Digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Amazon Mechanical Turk have transformed the study of human behavior and provided access to new subject pools for academic research. In our study, we leverage the Facebook Advertising Platform to conduct online surveys in the developing world. We assess the value of Facebook in Kenya, which has been chosen as a case study because it represents an average example of mobile and internet use on the African continent, and because we were able to synchronize our data collection with new rounds of the Afrobarometer survey and the 2019 national census. After a brief comparison of the 'audience estimates' produced by the Facebook Advertising Platform with population estimates from Kenya's 2009 census, we present the results of an online survey pilot run in July 2019. We compare the characteristics of the 957 online respondents to those surveyed by the 2016 Afrobarometer. We conclude with a discussion of next steps for the full scale study.