Survey: What Do You Think Of Our Surveys?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 02.25.08
When I write a survey, I try to: 1) make it entertaining and fun to read; 2) cover an area of interest in a timely fashion; 3) cover as big a spectrum of possible answers. I also assume that people who read TreeHugger accept that its writers have particular biases and are not surprised if the surveys reflect that. In our last survey on eating habits I tried to cover a lot of options including sustainably raised meat, but got comments ranging from "What a sh**y narrow minded pole,Give your readers at least a smidgeon of respect instead of this." to "Honestly I normally skip the polls on Treehugger because they tend to come across as overly biased and the snarkiness of the writing generally fails at entertaining." and worse. Maybe it is just that posts involving meat bring out the passion, or maybe we could do this better.
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Seriously. People go f#$%ing crazy over meat. Don't take it to heart.
I feel there needs to be a "more than one of the above" because I often can honestly pick two or three options.
Mostly I enjoy them. It's nice to know where other people stand.
Just like this one, I think it's not that they have too few choices, but that the choices miss possible viewpoints and sometimes more than one choice represent basically the same view.
Are there really people taking web polls seriously? I agree with "they're fun and I like them", but beyond that, if they really upset people that much, it may time for some treehuggers to switch to decaf.
I think web polls in general are fun, but the ones here at Treehugger are very frustrating. The answers often overlap, or ignore lots of options, or make assumptions about why people might agree/disagree with the question.
There are best practises for writing surveys, it'd be worth looking into those a bit if you want people to have more fun, which I'm sure you do :)
i love the surveys, but, truth be told, i really just like giving my opinion...
like a lot of people, i feel TH's surveys are often overly slanted or that choosing only one option isn't strictly true... for me, most of the time, my real answer lands somewhere between two or more choices and i end up choosing the 'less flattering' one because I'm not really as 'good' as the other choices seem... if that made any sense.
anyway, point being, it might be nice if at least some surveys included a multiple selection ability of some sort; whether it be in the wording of the answers or the ability to actually select more than one - which, i do understand, might be too difficult to set up. :D
I love the polls, but one thing:
You've gotta have a 'see current results' button!
I mean, I really think you should have one. People might not have their own firm oppinion, but are interested in seeing what others think.