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Questionnaire data and representative
Data
During the six week of survey a total of 454 valid
(more than 10 topics answered) responses were sent. To have an idea of how
big the percentage of filled questionnaires is compared to the number of
people just browsing the pages, the log files were analysed to count the
number of different page accesses for the two questionnaire files. The pages
were accessed 1'204 times (assuming that the next access was by a different
machine). This means that 37.7 percent of the people who have accessed the
questionnaire have filled it completely.
Representative
For the following reasons it can be assumed, that
the data is not representative for all the Internet users:
Not all people have WWW-access who are using
the Internet.
People who use the Internet just as a communication
media or playing MUD«s may never have received knowledge of this questionnaire.
Completion of the questionnaire was purely
optional.
Distribution was not done randomly, and different
Internet user "groups" were sought out.
There was greater distribution of the questionnaire
in Switzerland than in any other country.
To have an idea of how representative the survey
is, the general questions have been compared (age, gender) with two different
demographics survey, the 4th WWW-Survey and the Commercenet/Nielsen Internet
Demographics Survey.
The Fourth
WWW-Survey, conducted from October 10 through November 10, 1995, received
over 23,000 responses.
The Commercenet/Nielsen
Internet Demographic Survey was based on two different methods: a random-sample,
telephone-based survey (August 3 through September 3, 1995) of over 4200
respondents (population US and Canada); and a parallel online survey (August
18 through September 13) to estimate bias introduced by Web-based surveys
(over 32,000 self-selecting respondents). The results have been questioned
by some researchers, because the estimates of the Internet size appear "too
high" and not enough information has been released to reconcile the
estimates with others published estimates.
These surveys are not easy to compare, since most
of the participants of the questionnaire were from Switzerland (4th WWW-survey
participants from world wide, Commercenet/Nielsen survey participants in
US/Canada). Also, the topic of the 4th WWW-survey is about the World-Wide
Web and the topic of Commercenet/Nielsen about Internet users.
Additionally, a newly formed discussion group is
researching the validity and problems of doing psychological surveys on
the World Wide Web:
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