Monday, April 12, 2010

City asks residents to fill out online survey

Have any of you seen this????

City officials want residents to fill out an online survey to assist the city with prioritizing community development and housing needs.

The survey will be available through May 1 at the city's Web site;

City of Racine Survey

3 comments:

OrbsCorbs said...

I haven't followed the debate closely, but from what little I've skimmed/scanned, the fact that people can take the survey over and over (probably just clear the cookies?) seems to invalidate any results.

hale-bopp said...

I didn't take the survey, but I did check it out. They are using a website called Survey Monkey to collect the results. I have used Survey Monkey in several projects and know it pretty well.

You can set it to allow only one response per ip address. I don't know if they did this or not.

Even if they did, they are relying on a self-selected sample which is not considered a good thing if you want statistically valid results!

One of my part time jobs in my youth was working for a survey research firm (started on the phones calling people...that only lasted a couple of weeks until they realized I was very good at data analysis and then I got to learn all kinds of cool stuff about survey design and sampling). I could take that survey and probably write several pages of opinion on the design (if I thought that was a good use of my time!)

Tim the Shrubber said...

"...they are relying on a self-selected sample which is not considered a good thing if you want statistically valid results!"

Yep. Without a random sample are statisitcal reasoning is out the window.

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"You can set it to allow only one response per ip address. I don't know if they did this or not. "

If they did, that presents an entirely new set of problems. Then they are possibly excluding valid responses. Giving the way IPs are recycled in a dynamic pool or shared on some networks you cannot say that an IP is in any way unique.