j’s scratchpad

Some colleagues of my blogging friend Bob are gathering data about where people go online for political information, including blogs. If you are eligible to vote in the United States and can spare a moment to contribute to scholarly research about how people use the Internet, perhaps you’d like to take their survey.

Addendum 10/21: I took the survey. It says it should take about twenty minutes and that’s a fair estimate. It would have taken me less time had I not spent so much time analyzing the questions and what they’re really asking.

As an information professional, I tend to analyze data and surveys to get a better idea of what the data will say and what it won’t say. If you’d like to take the survey, you probably shouldn’t read these thoughts until after you’ve completed the survey.

It’s kind of a quirky survey because it doesn’t account for other factors that might influence someone’s increased interest in politics besides being more involved in the Internet. For example, someone might be more politically active just because s/he’s finally old enough to vote, not because s/he spends a lot of time on the Internet or someone might only get excited by presidential elections, so for the past four years, s/he hasn’t been politically active. The wording of some of the survey questions implies the Internet by itself makes people more involved in politics.

The survey seems to assume that people are only active in politics to support a particular candidate, not for other reasons. I attended a number of campaign events in New Hampshire this past winter to learn about the candidates and attempt to report about them in a somewhat neutral fashion on the Internet. The way the questions are worded, there isn’t a way for me to say “I participated in these activities. I learned about them on the Internet. But I didn’t go to support any particular candidate.”

The survey also seems to assume that everyone pays attention or has access to things like cable television or uses sources like newsgroups and chat rooms. There’s a section where survey takers are asked to rank certain sources based on certain factors, but there isn’t a way to say “I don’t use this source, so I can’t rate it on this factor.” I wonder how that’s going to influence the gathered data.

There’s also a question that implies the survey respondent does not hold any political office.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 20th, 2004 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.