Methodological challenges to collecting primary data on Internet users in rural China

Despite its long term impact on planning, evaluation and documentation of Internet development, measurement of Internet usage is largely neglected in government policy actions in rural China. For researchers interested in evaluating government policy outcomes and Internet usage patterns in rural China, the only option is collecting primary data, which is resource-intensive and often fraught with data quality issues that entail many tradeoffs. Such quality issues have not been discussed in the literature in sufficient depth; this paper fills this void by discussing the challenges of collecting primary data on rural Internet users and suggests strategies for handling these issues based on the authors' experiences of fieldwork in rural China.