John Tierney, from the New York Times’ Tierney Lab blog, posts an interesting article on the reliability of a survey done by volunteers.
Here are a couple of interesting excerpts:
“Respondents and non-respondents, no doubt, differ on a variety of dimensions, such as how much free time they have, their ability or motivation to introspect, and their desire to learn more about themselves.”
“…it is worth noting that almost any single paper in the social science literature is vulnerable to generalizability critiques, whether they use Internet-based surveys like ours or not. Surveys in which a randomly selected, nationally representative sample is invited to participate face the same critique if less than 100% of invited respondents participate.”
“I see online surveys as a great new tool for social science because they can gather so much information. Sure, the individual pieces information aren’t as precise as traditional surveys, but when aggregated they can be valuable.”
The whole article, which I strongly recommend, can be found here:
Can you trust someone like you? [TierneyLab Blog | NY Times]
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