4 ms·

Ask HN: How to reach a lot of people for a master thesis questionnaire

2 points by guddal 9y ago

I am student in psychology and want to ask some programming people some questions. Is there a way to reach a lot of people? The questionnaire do not take more than 20min.

ordu 9y ago
GoogleForms https://www.google.com/forms/about/ https://www.google.com/forms/about/
- guddal 9y ago
  Thats true but I do not have so many contacts, to send them the link to the form. I need a platform to post the link. :-)
  - ordu 9y ago
    Is it the only difficulty? I didn't do that, but I know person who did. He just posted link to his questionnare in the FB publics devoted to psychology. He asks his contacts (he is also have not a lot of contacts) to repost, describing how it important to him. It allowed him to gather a few hundreds of participants in a week. As for my thoughts, I think that it is important to make a short introductory description of questionaire, to tell potential participants why this research is important. Motivation is very important. It would be great if after answering questions participant will be rewarded, for example, if you tell him/her something interesting for him/her. The most of participants have a hope to learn something about himself, if you can give him feedback of this kind, based on questionaire, I belive, it can help to attract more participants. Alternatively you can promise them feedback in the future after data processed. It can help, I participated one time in such a research.
drallison 9y ago
Presumably you want to use the results (statistics) of your questionnaire as data to prove or disprove some hypothesis. How you choose your sample will determine whether your results reflect the actual population. You should consult a good statistics text to learn about selecting your sample. Self-selection is generally not a good strategy. How you frame questions in your questionnaire will also have a significant impact on the answers you receive. If you expect to rely on the answers, you need to study and characterize the questions. Wording and grammar and question redundancy are important. Questionnaires need to be validated experimentally. There is, of course, a substantial literature on questionnaire formulation. One more thing, p-value tests of significance, once the gold standard, are now controversial (at best) and discredited (in some circles). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value

2 points by guddal 9y ago

I am student in psychology and want to ask some programming people some questions. Is there a way to reach a lot of people? The questionnaire do not take more than 20min.

ordu 9y ago

GoogleForms https://www.google.com/forms/about/ https://www.google.com/forms/about/

guddal 9y ago
Thats true but I do not have so many contacts, to send them the link to the form. I need a platform to post the link. :-)
- ordu 9y ago
  Is it the only difficulty? I didn't do that, but I know person who did. He just posted link to his questionnare in the FB publics devoted to psychology. He asks his contacts (he is also have not a lot of contacts) to repost, describing how it important to him. It allowed him to gather a few hundreds of participants in a week. As for my thoughts, I think that it is important to make a short introductory description of questionaire, to tell potential participants why this research is important. Motivation is very important. It would be great if after answering questions participant will be rewarded, for example, if you tell him/her something interesting for him/her. The most of participants have a hope to learn something about himself, if you can give him feedback of this kind, based on questionaire, I belive, it can help to attract more participants. Alternatively you can promise them feedback in the future after data processed. It can help, I participated one time in such a research.

drallison 9y ago

Presumably you want to use the results (statistics) of your questionnaire as data to prove or disprove some hypothesis. How you choose your sample will determine whether your results reflect the actual population. You should consult a good statistics text to learn about selecting your sample. Self-selection is generally not a good strategy. How you frame questions in your questionnaire will also have a significant impact on the answers you receive. If you expect to rely on the answers, you need to study and characterize the questions. Wording and grammar and question redundancy are important. Questionnaires need to be validated experimentally. There is, of course, a substantial literature on questionnaire formulation. One more thing, p-value tests of significance, once the gold standard, are now controversial (at best) and discredited (in some circles). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value