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Speaker: Dr Femke De Keulenaer, Ipsos European Public Affairs
Abstract
The term 'hard-to-reach' describes population groups that are challenging to survey. These groups may be rare, hidden, difficult to locate or contact, and often reluctant to participate in surveys.
Within KnowledgePanel Europe, 'hard-to-reach' refers to populations with low recruitment and participation rates, such as young people, the elderly, and individuals with lower education or income levels.
Ipsos' KnowledgePanel is an online probability-based panel established in the United States in 1998 – it became part of Ipsos in 2018.
It has been operational in the UK since 2020, and expanded to Croatia, France, Italy, Poland, Spain and Sweden in 2022. Probability-based panels in the Netherlands and Germany were integrated through acquisition.
Panel members are recruited via random probability sampling and digitally excluded individuals can join by phone or mail.
In this presentation, Femke De Keulenaer will examine strategies used across various European KnowledgePanel countries to recruit and engage hard-to-reach population groups.
The webinar will focus on recruitment strategies, such as postal, face-to-face and telephone recruitment, alongside approaches to engage different target groups.
By sharing insights and experiences, this presentation seeks to enrich the discourse on the challenges and opportunities of maintaining population-representative probability-based online panels.
About the speaker
Dr Femke De Keulenaer is a Senior Research Director in the Ipsos European Public Affairs team (EPA). She has nearly 25 years’ experience in social and public opinion research at Ipsos and, prior to that, at The Gallup Organisation and the University of Antwerp. Femke has led numerous studies for European and international institutions.
Femke is a trained survey methodologist and has a particular responsibility within Ipsos EPA for methodological decisions, including sampling and weighting, and quality assurance. She leads the KnowledgePanel Research Methods Centre, which sets the quality standards for KnowledgePanel Europe. Femke’s expertise is grounded in academic research.
At Gallup, she studied methods for combining and weighting samples from multiple frames, including probability and non-probability samples. During her time at the University of Antwerp, she researched non-response and attrition in the Panel Study of Belgian Households (1992-2002), exploring ways to maintain panel engagement.
She is also a lecturer in research methods at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and a regular speaker at international conferences. Femke holds a master’s degree in Sociology from the University of Gent, an advanced master’s in Quantitative Analysis from the Catholic University of Brussels and a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the University of Antwerp.
She is the national representative for Belgium for the World Association of Public Opinion Research (WAPOR) and a member of the executive committee of the Comparative Survey Design and Implementation (CSDI) group.
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