I Took a Survey
Posted by Jim at June 27th, 2005
I took a survey that someone at MIT is apparently conducting. As someone who put in a substantial number hours of my life learning how to write and analyze surveys, I can’t help but note that the people taking this one are a self-selected group. This is potentially hazardous in that you always have the potential to get too many people from one group or another.
Bearing in mind that the survey is about blogs and that there’s no decent list of bloggers, self-selection may be the only realistic way to do it. If you’ve got a blog feel free to click on the link below…
Hey Jim, I took a look at what they were doing and it looks like they are going to select a group of bloggers at random, as well as using data from the self-selected group. The statistics will be broken out between these two groups.
In their detailed description of how they are sampling:”In addition to those webloggers that choose to help us voluntarily, we have also randomly selected 5000 weblogs to act as a representative sample of the greater weblog community. If you received an email which said you were selected, you are part of this group, and your responses are ever so important to us.” Also: “Everyone who maintains a weblog is welcome (and encouraged) to take the survey. Results for both sample pools (invited and self-added) will be collected and analyzed.”
Ed Hand
Ed, it looks like I should read more before I comment. Thanks for pointing that out.
Jim Zoetewey