Designing good surveys is hard work. Andrew Gelman posted an example of unintended consequences in survey design yesterday. A survey question asked “How many people do you know who have a second home?” Apparently some respondents thought the question was asking about folks who own vacation homes while others thought the question referred to immigrants.
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Daniel Lemire 11.30.09 at 13:11
Forget surveys. Think corporate data. Silly things like income can be defined in twelve different ways inside the same corporation.