• Until recently there has been no priority on rigorous sampling and as a result online access panels have had their origin in direct mail and coupon promotion responders. Access panels now face considerable problems which are being reported on the journals. Esomar’s Professional Standards Committee is soon to release its first guidelines on online access panels which are likely to render most online panels of limited value.

How an access panel works

• In an access panel sub-samples are drawn for each ad hoc survey from a master database. To enable such samples to be drawn, basic data are collected such as demographics product usage and attitudes, lifestyle and socio-economic variables. This usually saves an enormous amount of screen time for the research agency. An access panel should be representative of the universe it purports to cover.
• However access panels need to be large in order to deliver large numbers of sub samples for surveys. Up until now access panels have been used only in online research where anti-spam rules make conventional random sampling impossible.
• There is clearly a need to build an opt-in research only database representative of all people that can provide the basis for conducting all forms of market research.
• Once such an opt-in research database is available, then major research users would be able to draw down representative target respondent samples for cost effective research.
• Many times the cost of screening respondents who fit the target market is more than 50% of the total interviewing cost. This document will show that 50% or more of the interviewing cost for telephone interviewing is reached when penetration of the target is 14% of the population or less.