RE: Assistance for Technical Communication Surveys needed.

["McLauchlan, Kevin" <Kevin -dot- McLauchlan -at- safenet-inc -dot- com>]

> -----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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