10 7 / 2012

There’s no way that sending out an email and asking people to voluntarily fill out a survey, while warning that doing so might take as much as 20 minutes, will get you remotely useful results about anything — except perhaps about how many people will spend 20 minutes filling out a survey. So why is the Met doing this? I see two possibilities: either it has no idea how to get a representative sample, and thinks that it’s actually getting useful information here, or else it reckons that filling out surveys will somehow make its existing membership more loyal. Or, is there another reason?

There’s no way that sending out an email and asking people to voluntarily fill out a survey, while warning that doing so might take as much as 20 minutes, will get you remotely useful results about anything — except perhaps about how many people will spend 20 minutes filling out a survey. So why is the Met doing this? I see two possibilities: either it has no idea how to get a representative sample, and thinks that it’s actually getting useful information here, or else it reckons that filling out surveys will somehow make its existing membership more loyal. Or, is there another reason?

Permalink 4 notes

  1. johncabell answered: And it is never as brief as they say, AND by question 4 the lack of nuanced possible answers sends me to the exits. Still props for MET-dom.
  2. aliciee answered: like newspaper editors, their a bit unclear about how the Interwebs work.
  3. climateadaptation answered: i once sent out a narrow survey to 10k environmental professionals. return was ~450 - plenty of data to analyze.
  4. fragmentedfictions reblogged this from felixsalmon and added:
    You’re right, it could just be a ploy to make it’s stakeholders feel engaged. It probably is more like the primary way...
  5. felixsalmon posted this