On Dec 03, 2007, at 09:42 , Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:
If the questions are flawed then point out where. If the general
concept of a survey vs. user stories vs. what ever then state which
you think is more productive. If your problem is the medium/forum the
data is being gathered in see below.
I'll say this one last time.
It is not a question of whether the questions are flawed, it is the
communications medium in which they were posted.
You sent the "survey" to a single mailing list. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
This is, statistically speaking, a self-selecting and exceptionally
minor part of the community to which the survey is addressed, most
notably:
1. The survey will only be seen by people that currently use FreeBSD
(subset 1)
2. It will further only be seen by those that are aware of the [EMAIL PROTECTED]
mailing list and have taken the conscious decision to subscribe to
it (subset 2)
3. Within the readership of a relatively high volume mailing list (to
wit, the aforementioned [EMAIL PROTECTED]), a significant minority, at
best, will even notice the email (subset 3)
4. Further, within that subset, you are soliciting responses, whereas
folks in general are notoriously lazy, or simply believe that
responding to such a random survey is a waste of their time and effort
(subset 4)
5. Taking the sub-sub-sub-subset of folks that use FreeBSD, are
subscribed to the ports@ mailing list, have read your survey, and
responded to it, you then have to do analysis on what percentage of
responses are incomplete, flamebait, inaccurate, or otherwise flawed.
For example, compare the number of discrete folks that are, to one
extent or another, contributing to this thread, as a percentage of
total FreeBSD installed systems. Care to guess what that percentage
is? Unless it's significant, any results can be massaged into
anything at all. Without a statistically valid sampling, it is simply
not possible to make any conclusions with whatever dataset exists as a
result of said survey.
Stats 101.
-aDe
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