I work for a large employer and we often get students contacting us trying to promote surveys. Unless there's some kind of financial reward people often just can't be bothered to answer more than a couple of questions.
Dom
I was thinking about that, but came to the conclusion that it wasn't quite feasible for all the international people. Basically everyone but me, not even sure how it could be done or if there are legal aspects.
I *was* thinking having a raffle for some MrExcel books or something among participants. I was kinda saving that idea for enticing the regular users and hoping that the people already spending so much their time here would lend me some of theirs anyway.
I don't think so. That would be like asking MrExcel answerers about whether Excel is any good.
Here the question is "What makes you answer questions here on MrExcel?" This is like asking hunters about why they hunt.
Thank you Peter, that's a very good analogy. I was struggling with coming up with a good one. I felt the hunters-gun control was maybe a bit more black/white than this. diddi has a point and we discussed this privately while I was creating the survey (he has been helping me brainstorm about this for a long time, since I first happened to mention I wanted to do something like this, he's not just complaining out of the blue) that the respondents are clearly a very select group, thought in my defense I'm not doing the selection as such. but there's clearly a selection bias among respondents, it may not be that critical however as I'm targeting the most active users hoping then that they are also most likely to see this.
This is something that I will be trying to address in the subsequent article. It won't invalidate the line inquiry but it is something that needs to be considered.
The main focus of interest for me is just that, what makes people answer questions. E.g. the last few questions are very broad and general, and one could say not necessary as such. But it allows for mapping the underlying factors to the more general behavior, ostensibly at least.
Of course the questionnaire here is slightly overkill, but I'm struggling with requirements and what I can realistically do as PhD-student with no budget and a big fat deadline approaching. If only it was the other way around. I had the idea of splitting up the questionnaire in two parts, but I decided that getting one survey posted up was about what I could be expecting so I had to make this count. One fact of life when researching is that you have to compromise a bit (especially when your are not The Person, when asking your golf-buddies is ample empirical experience), not to mention the rather paradoxical situation where normally more is always asked by reviewers but the page-count of the paper is already used up. So eg taking an existing model and adapting that is more likely to be accepted than trying to create something from scratch and allows more exploration of results rather than motivating the model itself. The second approach was something I did not have the luxury to do anymore at this point.
This is something of a learning experience for me too.
by this time of night i agree with everyone.