GVU's WWW User Survey: Data Analysis

Problem

The World-Wide Web is clearly one of the most popular Internet resources. Yet because of its distributed, global nature, very little is known about its users, their characteristics, and why they are using the Web. A better understanding of these users, and their reasons for accessing the Web will lead to improved development of Web related tools and technologies as well as make the Web more usable by all users. The Graphics, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center's World Wide Web User Surveys are a public service effort. To date, over 90,000 responses have been collected through seven surveys and a basic analysis of responses is available to the public for free. These resuts are cited very widely and are used by researchers, developers, businesses and policy makers for a variety of purposes. The survey contains questions on: demographics, web usage, privacy, online purchasing, virtual banking, politics, webmasters, web authors and others. It is one of the more high-profile projects in the GVU Center.

As you might imagine given the amount of data we have, the basic analysis we conduct only begins to scratch the surface of what we could learn from the data. The project for this assignment is to conduct a detailed analysis of some part of our data sets to reveal interesting insights about the web population. Some sample topics are:

• What role does "experience on the internet" play in determining users attitudes toward online privacy?
• How do users from Asia differ from users in the US?
• What determines whether someone is likely to make a purchase over the internet?
• What is the interaction between developer's knowlege about Java and ActiveX and their perceptions about the security and utility of them?
• Can you characterize (or make predictions about) the demographics of users based on their online behaviors -- is there a correlation? (i.e. Can we assume that frequent visitors to news sites are also highly educated?)

Students may work in teams of 2 or individually on this project. Some knowledge of inferential statistics is helpful.

Background

• http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/ All previous results and information are available at this site.
• Read: Results from the Third WWW User Survey
  James E. Pitkow & Colleen Kehoe
  The World Wide Web Journal, Vol. 1 no. 1, 1995
• Read: Surveying the Territory: GVU's Five WWW User Surveys
  Colleen M. Kehoe & James E. Pitkow
  The World Wide Web Journal, Vol. 1, no. 3, 1996
  

Deliverables

• A 4-5 page document (when printed) describing your findings which will be added to the survey web site. The document should be formatted in HTML in a style similar to the other papers on the site.

Evaluation
Evaluation is based on the quality of your report both in terms of content and writing. Please see Colleen before beginning this project!