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People Who Abuse Surveys and Why You Shouldn’t Fear Them
By crooky | January 23, 2008
I can happily report that for the most part, respondents to surveys don’t cheat and/or lie. If it’s an anonymous survey, why would they lie? They have to know that they’re only one respondent amongst hundreds and their chances of influencing the outcome of the survey is very small. Those who attempt to abuse the anonymous survey are clearly not very intelligent and possibly low-life, pond-scum sucking sub-humans. On a previous survey I conducted, one young woman from Richmond, British Columbia had the audacity to cheat not twice but nine times. Even more puzzling was the fact that she left her real name and home phone number on each entry. I checked back on a previous survey and she’d done the same thing. Instead of just deleting her entries and letting her think that she was very clever, I also called her home and called her out. She didn’t appreciate the call and was frankly shocked that someone would have figured out her ingenious scheme. The point is - it’s not hard to sniff out most cheaters and filter their results out of the survey.
Here’s how:
1. IP Address Tracking
My preferred survey tool is SurveyMonkey. SurveyMonkey tracks people’s IP addresses. Can I tell where you live from your IP address? I doubt it. If I could, I don’t know how. I don’t save that information, to be sure. What it does let me do is tell how many times a survey is submitted from the same IP address. If I see six surveys submitted from the same IP address and they’re all answered in an identical manner - that tells me that you’re either an idiot or you’re trying to scam me. Neither is going to get you very far. DELETE DELETE DELETE DELETE!
2. Contest Entries
Many of my surveys have a prize draw attached to them. If you enter the prize draw and put in your contact information so that you can win the prize after trying to cheat the system, I’ll know. Most people aren’t clever enough to utilize aliases and fake e-mail addresses for this kind of cheat.
3. IP Filtering
If I choose to, I can not allow more than one entry per IP address. This is kind of like the way some contests don’t allow multiple entries per household. I don’t always do this because some surveys are looking for broad public input and you don’t want to rule out people who use computer labs at school or the computers at the public library. There’s no way to cheat that setup unless you’re a hacker wizard and can fabricate fake IP addresses at will. Alternately, you could walk down the street and use someone else’s computer but I don’t think I’m wrong in assuming that if you’re too stupid to know that trying to cheat an anonymous survey is a boneheaded thing to do, you’re probably also lazy and hence, won’t think of using someone elses’ computer.
In a nutshell, cheating an anonymous survey in any meaningful way is harder than it sounds and if you do happen to succeed, in a statistically representative survey where the majority of the other respondents are decent people - your net impact will amount to a rounding error. If you’re someone who likes to cheat on surveys - here’s a treat for you.
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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.
Topics: Research Methodologies |
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January 23rd, 2008 at 5:36 pm
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