[2] Panel members are typically recruited through an agency campaign, often with some kind of incentive, or appealing to those who simply wish to share their opinion.
[3][2] Other fields that contain prominent usage of online panel data include psychological, social, and medical research, as well as electoral studies.
Usage has steadily increased since this time, with one analysis putting their prevalence at 14.3% of their dataset of the empirical articles published in 2017.
[3] Online panels are a useful way to keep costs down but to also reach a high number of people, which makes them ideal for either pilot studies or scale development.
[6] One analysis found that an online panel was biased in a way that reflected Internet demographics, with women, the elderly, and the uneducated being less represented in the sample; the analysis found that this sample was biased and statistical weighting could not overcome the issue.