Time for “How Now Brown Cow” Studies

Accuracy in Academia ^ | June 20, 2017 | Malcolm A. Kline

[JayGalt]

I bet this researchers are being pwned by scores of people answering a stupid question with a stupid answer.

[bgill]

I can remember the kindergarten teacher calling in my mother because I just wasn’t getting all excited about reading about cute little farm animals and drawing farm stuff. Mom informed her we lived on a farm.

[spokeshave]

And 5% of UBER passengers don't know that Turkeys lay eggs...

Note to self....put a hard boiled turkey egg in my lunch box.

And many not aware that goat meat is edible.

[Nothingburger]

That’s my thought exactly.

I take online surveys for small prizes like Amazon gift cards — I’ve gotten some nice books that way.

But if you do this a few times a week, you get really cynical about polls and surveys in general. This extends way beyond what we already know about how biased political polls have become.

It seems that marketing pollsters have become incapable of building surveys that consist of a relative handful of appropriate and direct questions.

For example, I’ve taken a fair number of surveys about the financial institutions I use.

Typically, they have maybe 100 questions, each asking you to rate on a 1-10 scale such inane assertions as:

“[Bank] is fun”

“[Bank] is cool”

“I feel like I’ve earned the privilege of using [Bank]”

I could go on, but you get the general drift here. Some of the questions are fair — “[Bank] provides good customer service” — but overall, you get the impression that the pollsters are padding their product.

Maybe they get paid more for longer surveys — despite the fact that people will only pay attention for so long.

What a screwed-up mess. But I like the Amazon gift cards.

[yoe]

These young people have been raised by a Television set with goofy characters badly drawn, not by a parent. On into their teens perfectly stupid shows showing bad behavior and bad English for starters have finished off several generations of illiterate men and women.

Pull the plug parents

[LouAvul]

No kidding. Take that bunch of loony tunes out of any statistical analysis and suddenly things don’t look nearly so bad.

[momincombatboots]

And operate complicated electronic devices.

[Impala64ssa]

It would be hilarious to see where these fools think an old school Noo Yawk style chocolate egg cgream comes from. :)

[Rebelbase]

“brown cows” would be my answer on any survey that offered that choice for the origin of chocolate milk.

I suspect others of doing the same.

[arthurus]

6% of all American adults have a sense of humor on display when asked inane questions by a surveyer.

[5th MEB]

I KNOW, I KNOW; From the chocolate EASTER BUNNY. :)

[Impala64ssa]

LOL!