GVU's Seventh WWW User Survey General Graphs

Falsification of Information

Notes:

For the Seventh Survey, 59.93% of respondents said they had never provided false information to a site when registering (compared to 63.1% on the Sixth Survey). This means that approximately 40% of respondents have provided false information. A total of 14.59% of users report falsifying information over 25% of the time--a disturbing number if you are trying to make the claim that the collected demographics of a site's online registered users are representative of the entire set of users for that site.

A larger percentage of females than males report never having falsified information (68.00% of females vs. 56.35% of males). Also, the likelihood of having provided false information decreases with age. Both of these trends were also found in the Sixth Survey.

Table of Data for All Categories

Falsification of Information	All	Male	Female	USA	Europe	19-25	26-50	50+
26-50	1052.00 6.03%	824.00 6.81%	228.00 4.26%	832.00 5.92%	92.00 7.79%	281.00 8.33%	586.00 5.56%	49.00 2.30%
51-75	608.00 3.49%	481.00 3.98%	127.00 2.37%	470.00 3.34%	51.00 4.32%	177.00 5.24%	335.00 3.18%	25.00 1.18%
Never	10455.00 59.93%	6815.00 56.36%	3640.00 68.00%	8563.00 60.88%	583.00 49.36%	1521.00 45.07%	6618.00 62.77%	1720.00 80.87%
Over 75	885.00 5.07%	732.00 6.05%	153.00 2.86%	684.00 4.86%	78.00 6.60%	228.00 6.76%	479.00 4.54%	64.00 3.01%
Under 25	4444.00 25.48%	3239.00 26.79%	1205.00 22.51%	3516.00 25.00%	377.00 31.92%	1168.00 34.61%	2526.00 23.96%	269.00 12.65%

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