What You Need to Know About Using Web Survey Data

With technology advancing faster than you or I can imagine, it’s crucial to consider the effects these changes have on surveying practices.

Pew Internet just released some interesting results about the generational differences in using the Internet that are very relevant to Web surveying studies.  Pew ranked 20 Internet activities – ranging from using search engines and social media to doing medical research or rating things [full list at the bottom] – among six age groups.

For companies who gauge customer feedback via the Internet, the results for “Rating Things” bears attention.

The percentage of individuals who used the Internet for “Rating Things” varied from a low of between 10-19% for the oldest group (age 74+) to a high of between 40-49% for Silent Generation (age 56-64).

All of the six age groups ranked “Rating Things” in the bottom half of all the categories and for the youngest groups (ages 18 through 55) the rankings were in the bottom 25%.

Perhaps a case can be made that younger individuals are less opinionated than their elders.  Or that they are busier doing other things on the Internet.  But for companies that use Web surveys to collect customer feedback, the implications are that survey results may be skewed based on age.  Depending on who your target audience is, the impact may be critical. For example, younger customers are less inclined to “Rate Things” online, thus less likely to take the survey, resulting in an inaccurate reflection of your customer base.

Web surveys are certainly an economical way to get speedy feedback from customers.  Who those customers are – and whether they represent your company’s total customer population – adds a wrinkle to evaluating and, more importantly, using the survey data.

How to Counter-Act Skewed Web Survey Data

Several of our Web survey clients audit their survey results annually using live agent interviews to achieve results that have a confidence level of 95% +/-5% or better.  A small sample of live agent survey results are compared to the Web survey data for the same period to ascertain whether there are meaningful differences.  Knowing what the differences are helps clients make better business decisions using their economical, Web survey results.

See the whole study at pewinternet.org or a summary here: http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/generations-internet-infographic/.

The list below ranks Internet usage activities across all age groups:

–Ann Knowles

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