2nd demographic survey

Skip Montanaro (skip@automatrix.com)
Fri, 16 Dec 1994 10:25:29 -0800

It's not so hard to identify some reasons why the survey response was so
skewed.

1. While there may be a lot of folks on the Web, the folks who are on
the Web most, and most likely to see the various announcements about
the survey, are the folks developing stuff. Surfing around, looking
for links or other ideas, or just checking out the competition.

2. The survey required the patience of Job to complete. It was huge and
stretched the limits of most (all?) browsers. I was using NCSA
Mosaic 2.4 for X, one of the "recommended" browsers, and it wasn't
able to handle the huge pages of check boxes and other input gadgets.
I tried several times to complete it, but finally gave up after
completing about 3/4ths of it. I don't know if I was counted as one
of the 3,299 respondents (someone else said 18,000 - where'd that
come from?), but if so, my data was incomplete.

It may well be impossible to create a Web-based a survey that is not wildly
skewed. Perhaps other mechanisms need to be employed (phone, mail, email)
to generate less biased results.

--
Skip Montanaro          skip@automatrix.com                       (518)372-5791
Automatrix - World-Wide Computing Solutions          http://www.automatrix.com/
Check out: VW Van information: http://www.automatrix.com/~skip/volkswagen/