A Comparison of Recruitment Methods for Drone Public Perception Surveys

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-3403.vid Public perception surveys report that remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS), or drones, continue to become more mainstream than ever before. However, the quality of these surveys varies due to biases in participant recruitment and survey methodology. This study presents a comparison of data sets that were acquired by a convenience recruiting strategy performed by the research team (n=233) and an online market research panel performed by Qualtrics (n=1022). Results show that the contracted recruitment yielded a sample that closely resembles the requested socio-demographic quotas, while the researcher-recruited data was skewed toward young adults. Furthermore, results from questions pertaining to general attitude towards RPAS and mission-based support for RPAS differed for the two data sets, with the higher level of support generally belonging to the researcher-recruited group. Finally, a set of best practices is proposed for participant recruitment and data collection to better standardize drone public perception surveys.