Communicative means for barrier-free survey research

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Volker Gehrau
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458311967

The UN Convention of 2006 obliges all public institutions to strive for the inclusion of all population groups, and the EU Web Accessibility Directive of 2016 stipulates barrier-free Internet offerings from public institutions. So far, however, there is no obligation to make publicly funded or commissioned surveys barrier-free. Especially for scientific surveys, item batteries are often used, which are already difficult to handle for people with reading difficulties. Thus, large parts of the population are excluded from representative surveys. As a result, the special needs of people with disabilities are often not included in decision-making processes when these are based on survey results. On the other hand, tools for achieving accessibility are available especially for online offers: Reading function and speech recognition, simple language, size adjustment and magnifying glass, visualizations etc. The goal of the project is to investigate whether the use of appropriate tools is suitable to enable people with disabilities to participate in surveys and to facilitate participation for people without disabilities, thus increasing their willingness to participate and motivation. The basic idea of the study is: Accessibility in surveys benefits everyone and in the long run increases the response rates of representative surveys.This will be investigated with several partial studies. A systematic literature analysis as well as expert interviews will first clarify accessibility requirements in the context of surveys and identify available tools for this purpose. The findings will be discussed and systematized in a workshop with experts. Then, a survey on career orientation of adolescents and young adults will be designed with different variants of tools for accessibility. The survey variants will be conducted in classes at vocational colleges with persons of different educational levels and analyzed in an experimental comparison between the questionnaire variants. At the same time, adolescents and young adults with learning difficulties are observed in a teaching/learning laboratory when dealing with the survey variants. In addition, a specialized service provider will examine people with disabilities in an inclusive research workshop. Barrier-free variants of the survey are examined and potential for optimization is sought. The observation as well as the inclusive research workshop will be evaluated in a rather qualitative systematizing way and combined with the quantitative results of the experimental survey. The results will be discussed with experts and affected persons in a second workshop and made available online, barrier-free to all interested parties.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants