Perspectives of Paid Panel Survey Research in Cybercrime Victimization and Offending: Validity of global online market research sampling and data collection

Surveys are common tools for gathering data on myriad topics, including the study of online deviance and cybercrime. Topics such as teen cybervictimization (Wright et al., 2021), differential association and self-control applied to cybercrime (Dearden & Parti, 2021), cyber hatred (Reichelmann & Costello, 2021), cybercrime and institutional anomie theory (Dearden et al., 2021), and cybercrime and COVID (Hawdon et al., 2020; Kemp et al., 2021) have been studied using the non-probability data collected from online panels and tools such as Mechanical Turk. However, the validity of these data is of concern. This chapter considers the validity of using online polling for cybercrime data. First, we compare data from two of the most prominent global data vendors. Next, we use a control question about the 2020 presidential election. This item allows us to consider the validity of both internet-polling services by comparing our online surveys with data from FiveThirtyEight’s “polls-only” and actual election results. Finally, we provide estimates of cybercrime offending and victimization from our data, and we discuss the differences in the estimates from the two samples.