It seems like every few months the AAA sends out another survey (in fact, I’ve probably griped about this before). Here is the latest, on digital publishing. I’ve stopped answering these. I felt the last three I responded to were very poorly constructed and so I’ve come to believe it is a waste of my time to participate in an exercise which seems constructed more to generate the semblance of support for policies the AAA has already decided upon than to genuinely investigate the concerns of its members.
It isn’t just the AAA, my university has also taken to doing surveys of the faculty. My feeling is that such surveys are a very poor substitute for genuine institutional democracy which gives members a voice in shaping policy. But even assuming that these institutions need to conduct this kind of research, surely we social scientists have better tools at our disposal than surveys? How about hiring some applied practicing anthropologists to research these questions?
Maybe the AAA should do a survey on how AAA members feel about surveys?
i emailed the power-that-is wrt the survey on the annual meeting. That survey was deplorable. There were textboxes with a 300 character limit, but you could only see 11 characters at a time. Then there was the final “do you have anything else to ask?” question that had a 10 character limit. The icing on the cake, though, was the fact that you could advance through the entire survey without answering any questions. i pointed out that even dorky internet meme quizzes require you to answer every question before advancing (although i see that’s been fixed for this particular survey. finally).
i was told that the 10 character limit was an error that was fixed quickly, which i have to dispute since i know i didn’t get to this thing right away and it took me a few days to get around to answering it, and that in the future they may consult with members who have had experience with surveys. It makes me wonder who is writing them now, if not people who have experience…
i think the AAA needs to hire a better company to run their surveys, preferably one that actually knows how to make one that works. Heck, they could go to OKCupid and it would probably work better from a tech standpoint. As to the questions… i give up on that one. i agree with you, i’ve never gotten so many survey requests evar. Even on FaceBook.
I have also stopped answering the surveys for multiple reasons, and am sick and tired of receiving the reminder e-mails to participate in the survey. I was particularly peeved about all of the emails surrounding the meeting survey since I didn’t attend the meeting. Maybe next time I’ll take a little creative license and answer their questions…
Perhaps we should make a campaign out of forwarding the following to the people who design these monstrosities.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/02/five-tips-for-better-online-surveys.html