How People Heard About the Surveys
Notes:
- This question attempts to begin to understand the response rates and
various populations on the Internet and Web. This is the second time we
asked the users to inform us how they found out about the current surveys.
We broke the data into groups whom responded via announcements
to newsgroups, other WWW pages, and listservs, etc. to see if these groups
of users are different from one another. This may very well be one of the
most interesting data points for understanding the use of the Web for
surveying.
- In the Third Survey, we observed very few differences between groups.
This lead us to conclude that if any segment of the Web user population
were excluded, statistically, we'd expect to find similar ratios and response
distributions. In the Fourth Survey, we note that there are more differences
between groups, notably between male and female users. Yet despite these
differences in the means of participation, the Fourth Survey's ratios for
gender are almost exactly those reported by other random number dialing
surveys. This decreases the reliance we formerly placed upon method of
entry as an indicator of bias and increases our confidence in the overall
robustness of the Fourth Survey's results.
- Note, the below percentages may add up to more than 100% as users we
able to select more than one response. Overall, 70%% of the users found out
about the Fourth Survey via other WWW pages, with 12.8% finding out via
"other" sources, and 15.7% finding out via Usenet newsgroup announcement.
Other forms of entry, e.g., friends, listservs, magazines, emailing,
people remembering, and newspapers all had under 2% response rates.
By Location
Notes:
- Weekenders were more likely to enter the survey via links from other
pages (74.1% Weekend vs 98.6% Weekday), while less likely to find out
about the survey via Usenet newsgroups and 'other' sources.
By Access Time
Notes:
- The three most effective entry points to the survey were: pointers from
other Web pages (61.2% women vs 73.1% men), 'other' sources (16.3% women vs
11.3% men), and Usenet news announcements (21.5% women vs 13.3% men).
- There were no significant differences between the response profiles of
women and men for the following categories: remembering to take the survey,
other Web pages, the newspaper, other sources, listserve announcements,
finding out via friends, magazines, and the www-surveying mailing list.
Given the low effectiveness of all but other Web pages and Usenet news
announcements, most of these differences lead to nominal effects.
- Thus, as stated above, while the surveys do show differences between gender
in the ways that people found out about the surveys, the gender ratios and
other characteristics do not differ unexpectedly from any of the random number
dialing surveys publically reported to date.
By Gender
Table of Data for All Categories
For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.
GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280