Survey

Who invested the survey? Surely the roots are in the census of ancient people’s. Remember the cause of the Biblical nativity scene? Mary and Joseph were called to Bethlehem for a survey conducted by XXX. They were essentially being counted. But were they also classified by sex, age, race, ancestry, town of origin, and current place of residence? That is a really interesting question. What became of those records or those of other censuses? Imagine a Dan Brown novel in which an archeologist discovers the actual census records of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus. What kind of twists could go into that?

At its roots a survey is an easy as asking questions and ticking off the answers on a roll of papyrus. However, what if you ask the questions wrong? Or what if you do not ask the right people? Then the answers you get represent a skewed sub-culture of the actual population. If you just ask all males what their favorite sport is, then the results are not going to represent the US. Football will probably be much more prevalent in that survey than is really characteristic of the US population.

Another way to skew the survey is to ask the survey question in the wrong way. “How many times a week do you beat your wife?” is probably not going to lead to answers that are a true reflection of social behavior. Getting at an issue like that requires a great deal of creativity and validation.

Some populations are self-selecting. In the Biblical example we assume that everyone was asked to report to the city of their birth. Do you think everyone actually went? Certainly not. Many are too poor, frail, ill, afraid of bandits, apathetic, busy, or enslaved to actually comply. The population who show up are self-selecting. There is already a bias built into this crowd. This would be like conducting a survey in a shopping mall in which you ask how often people buy clothing. This population is already predisposed to go to a shopping site, so their answers should be suspect if considered a fair assessment of the population.

Why survey at all? Why not collect data and use that to calculate the information you are looking for. For example, all credit card receipts can match credit score, home address, mortgage, and the stores shopped in. This is a wealth of information. This is great, but it does not tell us how the shoppers feel about the lighting in the mall or the composition of the stores available, or how many hours they spend shopping each week. Information like this is harder to get. However, the day is coming (very close to here now) when everyone’s cell phone will operate as a geographic location/tracking device. These records can then be used to track the movement of anyone at all times. Now we know how long people spend shopping. What a huge data set this will be. (WILL BE … not could be, or might be).

This type of progress is another instance in the depersonalization of society. It is one less activity that requires face-to-face, human-to-human interaction. Perhaps in the future we will be so starved for human contact that we will pay extra for anything involving the human touch …. $100 for an exam by a robot, $200 for an exam by a human doctor.

What has this all to do with surveys? Not as much as I had hoped … oh well, the dangers of the free writing mind. I think that new Dan Brown novel at the beginning is a million dollar idea.