A requirement for my Psych 100 class that I am taking this semester is that I must complete six credits of research through psychology studies advertised online. Most of the studies require students to report to a lab or classroom, but some can be completed online through websites like surveymonkey.com. As I hate traveling all around campus while I could just earn the same amount of credit on my computer, I tend to complete the online studies. Most of the studies take between 30 minutes to and hour. The studies I have completed range from the topics of dreams and sleeping to alcohol related questionnaires to studies on feelings and perceptions. After completing a handful of them, I have begun to realize that the results the testers receive are probably not the most accurate results in the world, therefore the studies probably cannot be construed as very accurate. Honestly, half way through I get irritated of clicking my mouse and selecting bubbles and start to flake on the validity of my answers. I always thought it was a bit interesting that they indirectly force students, by the incentive of points for grades, to fill out these long, time consuming questionnaires. I can confidently conclude that students are lazy and most likely do not give a crap about answering correctly, but just want to finish the survey and get on with their busy lives. Yes, this may sound unethical and careless, but I can only imagine how many students share this thought. Taking the other side of the story, the surveyors must know that they are conducting these surveys as requirements for students, and are aware that students are answering. So can they expect much? Well, it has to be hard for students to answer questions like: “on average how many drinks do you have per night?” and a myriad of other questions, which are almost repetitive in some respect, about our feelings and lives, most of which are also pretty general. The conclusion that I am beginning to reach is that most of these surveys that release their statistics based on student responses, so can they really be assessed as being accurate?
I definitely understand your plight. I haven't had to fill out any really extensive online psychological surveys for class, but I have had to do some in the past. The longest and most intensive of these was the PSU SAFE/AWARE survey that all freshman have to complete before the first semester starts. The first part of that took over an hour and by the end of it, I was just checking random boxes to get through it faster. I'm sure there are lots of people out there who do the same thing, so I always approach online surveys with a healthy amount of skepticism because of this.
ReplyDeleteYou make an interesting point about these surveys. I've never really thought about the laziness and carelessness of students when filling out these surveys that could potentially take away from the validity of the results. I definitely agree with you that many students do not care at all about the surveys they have to do as part of their grade. Whenever professors tell students that they have to do something that will be graded on completion, students are not going to put forth their best effort. We have better things, at least in our minds, that we can be spending our time on. All in all, I think it is a good idea to take the results of these online surveys with a grain of salt.
ReplyDeleteI feel like they'd probably have to pay a pool of people to come in and take them seriously. I've only even answered at most 50% of those things before i gave up and just started clicking "indifferent" for every answer.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you. I have noticed, even with the PSU SAFE/AWARE, that questions are often repeated two or three times. Do you think that is supposed to help the validity of the survey by seeing if students answer the same way multiple times, or does it actually take away from the study if students are having to rethink and maybe even over-think their answers the second or third times through? From what I have learned about survey design, I think it is difficult to effectively design a survey, especially when it is very long. I wonder how seriously surveyors take into account the fact that students are completing the surveys mostly for a grade under pressed time and if they look at earlier versus later answers differently.
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