Re: Open Source Survey

Hi Michael

Thank you for your feed back. The survey questions have been based on
the assumptions made by the relevant literature about the general
characteristics of open source users. I will have a look at the
employment question and see if it needs to be reviewed. The questions
that you refer to that seem to be irrelevant are actually designed to
compare motivations for participation etc with other voluntary groups.

Thanks again

Lara

Michael C. wrote:
On 7 Nov 2006 16:47:11 -0800,
Lara <lmth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello

My name is Lara Thynne and I am a PhD candidate at Deakin University
Australia. I am currently running a survey at the following address.

https://dcarf.deakin.edu.au/surveys/oss/

The survey is completely confidential and looks at your views and
motivations to use Open Source software and participate in the
community.

It will only take a few minutes and your contact details will not be
recorded. You can withdraw your participation at any stage.

The survey appears to concentrate on those actively involved in
the community, although your responses generally include N/A,
going through half of the survey with N/A doesn't generate much
useful data on OSS.

You also presuppose that respondents will have IT careers, which
isn't necessarily the case, and a few questions that have nothing
to do with anything.

I opted out in the middle of the survey and didn't play around to
verify that the questions didn't change, but you might want to
prescreen if you are only interested in IT professionals, or
branch to avoid groups of questions that are senseless if not
employed in IT. You might wish to move classification questions
to the end, and incorporate an option to refuse all
classification questions (unless of course you goal is to break
the results down demographically.)

You do appear to have better options than most surveys I have
seen, but you should at least include a generic "other" for
occupation.

Good luck,

Michael C.
--
mcsuper5@xxxxxxxx http://mcsuper5.freeshell.org/

A pessimist always wins.
He is either wrong (which is good), or he has the satisfaction
of being right.

.

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