<mark>surveys are cheaper to conduct compared to phone surveys.</mark><sup>3</sup> <mark>Traditional face-to-face surveys typically employ carefully designed probabilistic samples and are therefore representative. Another major advantage of in-person interviews is the ability to obtain high-quality and deeply insightful answers from these surveys, while Internet surveys are poorly suited for collecting answers to complex questions. However, face-to-face surveys are costly and are therefore difficult to implement frequently. They can also be difficult to field in conflict-affected environments due to security concerns.</mark> <mark>How important is the lack of representativeness of online surveys and to what extent can it be corrected using statistical reweighting techniques? To investigate these questions, we utilized data from online surveys to track labor market indicators during the COVID-19 pandemic. The surveys were administered over three data collection waves in Brazil, the Arab Republic of Egypt, Indonesia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, and Türkiye, between December 2020 and August 2021.</mark> <mark>Participants were recruited using Random Domain Intercept Technology (RDIT), a method that randomly selects internet users that mistype a web address or click on a broken link. The RDIT was developed by the RIWI corporation, and it works in the following way. RIWI takes ownership or temporary control of unused/abandoned websites or expired domains. Usually, users receive a “this page does not exist” message while they click on such websites while browsing the internet. However, because of RIWI’s ownership, users would now be led to a link to take up an RIWI survey. RIWI, by autodetecting the IP address of the survey participant, offers the survey in the local language. Participants are anonymized and do not get any incentives to take up the survey. The survey can reach countries where there could be potentially government restrictions because no entity has a list of RIWI-controlled domains, and RIWI often changes the list of domains it owns.</mark><sup>4</sup> <mark>RDIT has advantages over other methods of selecting Internet survey respondents including Internet panels or email-based solicitation. In panels, respondents might be conditioned to taking the survey and may even change their behavior if they have been repeatedly answering survey questions, or they may make more errors than fresh respondents, speeding through a survey or answering strategically to avoid follow-up questions (Toepoel et al. 2009). RDIT methodology, by the virtue of randomly targeting respondents and employing a repeated cross-section survey, avoids these issues. Email solicitation may also be problematic if the emails reach the respondents’ spam box, and because respondents are not anonymous (Schonlau and Couper, 2017; Roder-DeWan et al. 2019). Further, RDIT surveys are also consistent and reliable over time, as we see in our results in section 5. Another set of studies showed that an RDIT survey conducted every month for 21 months in India produced reliable estimates with low standard errors (Seeman et al. 2010; Seeman et al. 2016; Rizo et al, 2011). This is unlike online panel surveys where stability can be compromised due to high attrition among panel members (Toepoel et al. 2009).</mark>

> 3 However, responding to an online survey may not be cheap for responders living particularly in a Lower-Middle-Income (LMI) country, and having to pay a non-negligible amount of money to buy internet data. But data costs are increasingly cheaper in many developing countries.

> 4 RDIT has been used in several previous studies for examining attitudes related to mental illness, health care, and vaccination. For example, Sargent et al. (2022) tracked COVID-19 vaccination rates in real time, Seeman et al. (2016) studied attitudes on mental illness, and Roder-DeWan et al. (2019) studied the <mark>expectations of health care quality among low-income countries.</mark>

3