RE: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.

Subject: RE: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.
From: "McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>
To: Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>, William Sherman <bsherman77 -at- embarqmail -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2011 12:47:14 -0500



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gene Kim-Eng
> Subject: Re: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.
>
> The results will never actually be representative of anything other
> than
> the pool of people who actually take it. This is inherent in any
> survey,
> but especially so in one with a scope as narrow as this one is.
>

Absolutely.
But equally important (and skewing) is selection bias due to
self-selection by the participants.

There's an element of self-selection in door-to-door surveys,
where people are free to slam their doors (except maybe on
a census-taker or anybody carrying an official-looking
clipboard and wearing a hard hat), but there are multiple
levels of self-selection when you don't control your sampling,
even among/within a target population.

Granted, it might be of interest to determine the kinds of
responses you get from people who happened to be awake
and reading when your solicitation came through, were in
a part of their day or week where they had the time (or were
in such a tizzy with their real responsibilities that
your survey is seen as a sanity break) or had some agenda
that was served by contributing (versus not contributing,
or versus contributing with a different set of answers...
gaming the survey). But you wouldn't really have any
info there, either, unless you had a large sample without
those biases, or an overall sample so large that such
intertwined and sometimes conflicting biases would be
diluted by some corollary of the law of large numbers.

But I digress from my digressions.

- kevin

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References:
Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.: From: Gabrielle Shaffer
RE: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.: From: Dan Goldstein
FW: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.: From: Dan Goldstein
RE: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.: From: Robart, Kay
Re: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.: From: William Sherman
Re: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.: From: Gene Kim-Eng

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