When DIY Surveys Become DYI Surveys
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Aug 18, 2009
Last month’s
Research magazine had as its cover story “
World of temptation”, focusing on the negative ramifications of DIY (Do It Yourself) survey research:
The problem for the future of research as a discipline isn’t so much that SurveyMonkey has made simple research more accessible, but that the people doing the research might not be very good at it. This could be, as the prostitute said looking at two lovers kissing, a great profession ruined by amateurs.
“It’s great on one hand because it shows how much passion there is to get information about customers, but if any monkey can do a survey, perhaps any monkey will. In some cases there will be no control over design, no control over the sample,” says [Brad Bortner, a Forrester Research analyst specializing in the market research industry].
This article has inspired follow-on editorials and blog posts (e.g., “
Setting research free”) and quite a bit of discussion. One comment in particular stood out to me: “DIY is great as a means for firms to engage with their customers and generate
customer feedback,” commented
Gill Wales, an independent market researcher. “But the purveyors of DIY solutions need to make clear the limitations of the DIY solution in unskilled hands.”
As a fine purveyor of
survey software since 1993, I’ll take Gill up on her challenge. If survey tool providers were to write a Surgeon General’s style warning about the dangers of Do-It-Yourself research, what should it say? My take on it:
If you were the Survey General, what would you put on the label? How would you keep Do-It-Yourself surveys from becoming Do-Yourself-In surveys?
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