Questionaire Blog

This week's questionaire assignment wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I feel as though this was the easiest part of the project, because we have questions and feedback from the focus group that helped us shape the questions for the questionaire. It made us more prepared for the questionaire, making our job easier. I felt the most difficult part of the assignment was having to narrow down the questions and trying not to have too many questions on the questionaire. Now I am looking forward to passing out questionaires and reading more responses from our fellow college students.

Observation methods

After reading about the different observation methods, I found content analysis and television monitoring to be very interesting. I really would like to work for AC Nielsen, and I would love to do research and analyze results for them. I was shocked when I read about the eye-tracking monitor and the psychogalvanometer or the galvanic skin response. I found it to be quite extreme compared to the content analysis and television monitoring methods. The fact that they have to use infrared light beams that monitors eye movements and measure the electrical resistance of the skin is a little too much. But it must be very expensive and effective. I think that the content analysis, television monitoring scanner-based research and click-through rates would be the most useful. It seems that these methods are easier to conduct and the information would be easier to analyze. Also these methods wouldn't scare the subjects. Using infrared beams and being hooked up to all kinds of wires would definately scare me.

Ethical Issues

From personal experience in taking surveys, I understand the problems that these companies are facing with online surveys. These companies have to deal with survey takers not only lying about their real names and ages, but some respondents retake surveys to keep getting the incentives. I can honestly say that I have taken surveys only for the incentives and I have realized that some companies have made it so that you can't retake the same survey; not that I intentionally tried to retake a survey, I accidentally clicked on one that I had previously taken. I feel that research companies are wasting money creating programs and software that only allows legitimate respondents take the surveys, because people will always find loop holes, take the survey, and get the money or the free samples in the end. I would suggest that these companies should make people create profiles on their web sites in order to take the survey, that way they will be able to monitor the surveys and the people who are willing to go through the trouble of creating a profile and taking a thorough survey will get the incentive they deserve.