Reply To: Questions about Surveys

[jesse mcclure]

Randy,

Sorry for the slow responses during the Holidays. I did see this thread, but it seemed like you had done the right thing so all seemed well. You are right that the question does seem to be missing a valuable option for light brown or tan. Selecting black and white, and optionally the chocolate brown color with a comment that there is tan and/or tricolor ensures all the information is there.

We can revise questions, but that would make the data inconsistent as many people will have answered the old version of the question, and new members will get the revised version. That makes analysis virtually impossible. Instead what we are doing is keeping track of questions that do not work well (there are quite a few!) and we will include a revised version of these questions – as needed – in future surveys. Another good example is “Dog sits frog style.” A lot of people have been very confused by that question having no idea what it was referring to – so the answers to that question will not be particularly meaningful. We do have an upcoming survey on “Resting Styles” that includes frog-style and many other lounging positions with good example photos and descriptions.

We really take a bit of the pasta chef approach to the surveys: we throw it all against the wall and see what sticks. We certainly don’t want to waste anyone’s time with questions that are obviously no good, but often we don’t know which questions will be useful until we get lots of responses and comments.