However, to date, the literature on geofences in surveys is very sparse, and no clear study design guidelines exist that would help researchers to avoid certain pitfalls when employing this technology for survey research. (2019) used smartphone geofences to evaluate if specific characteristics of locations such as bars are associated with consuming more alcohol when visited by study participants. Geofences allow researchers to target these questions about people’s moods or behaviors when they are at a specific location (e.g., at school, the work place, a fitness studio). Usually, EMAs consist of asking participants about their current affect or behavior at random points in time during a day.
Geofences might also be used in combination with ecological momentary assessments (EMAs, e.g., Stone and Shiffman 1994). In market research, geofences are used to collect real-time feedback about a store or other establishment aimed at reducing the recall bias of costumers (Greenwood 2017). The geofence software can identify if the individual is inside or outside the geofence. For a geofence to work, the individual needs to carry a device, such as a smartphone, that collects geolocation data and allows geofence software to run within an app that triggers the survey invitation. Keywordsĭesigned for the purpose of survey data collection, a geofence can be defined as a geographical area that triggers a survey invitation when an individual enters the area, dwells in the area for a defined amount of time or exits the area. Subsequently, we formulate the lessons learned that will help researchers improve their own geofence studies. We highlight the limitations in our design and examine how those shortcomings affect the number of falsely triggered surveys. This article provides an overview of our geofence survey, including our experiences analyzing the data. Overall, the app sent 230 geofence-triggered survey invitations to 107 participants and received 224 responses from 104 participants. We implemented a geofence survey in a smartphone data collection project and geofenced 410 job centers with the Google Geofence API. While geofencing is already used in other contexts (e.g., marketing and retail), this technology seems so far to be underutilized in survey research. Geofences may be used to administer context-specific surveys, such as an evaluation survey of a shopping experience at a specific retail location. Within the survey context, a geofence can be defined as a geographical area that triggers a survey invitation when an individual enters the area, dwells in the area for a defined amount of time or exits the area. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)
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