[Home Page] [Previous Page]
[Old Roundtable Archives] [New Roundtable]
Posted by Michael Branham on July 01, 1998 at 20:01:22:
In Reply to: Re: Poorly Designed Online Surveys posted by David Eagle on July 01, 1998 at 19:05:58:
You are correct that allowing potential respondents to view the results before completing the survey is a source of bias if respondents allow the preview to influence their 'vote' in any way. And you're also correct that there will always be people that try to 'stuff the ballot box' for any type of survey which allows a preview of results-to-date prior to participation. Also, the MF surveys don't have any sort of mechanism to keep respondents from participating more than once -- so it's anybody's guess how much skewing comes from individuals who vote more than once.
You are also correct that MF's target audience would probably have a tendency to favor search engines that cater to business/financial types. Equally important in the case of the search engine survey is the fact that MF left out almost half of the most popular search engines (guess they fell into the 'other' category).
The quality of the questions and answer choices vary widely from day to day. Sometimes they are very good, and sometimes they are quite sloppy. That's why it the MF surveys are interesting as an ongoing case study.
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Poorly Designed Online Surveys