Hm, an interesting way of doing medical research...

[eredien]

Follow this link to complete the survey!

The test above takes you to an online health survey of livejournal users for research purposes for a university project. Interesting, and well worth your time.

Comments

Interesting indeed...

[thespooniest.livejournal.com]

Call it morbid curiosity if you want, but I decided to check this out. Don't worry; I had no intention of skewing the results by submitting an actual reply. I respect the integrity of a scientific study, though I question the feasibility of using an Internet poll for scientific studies. You have no control over the experimental group; I could easily have lied to say I was female (and no doubt, others have already done this) and no one would have been the wiser.

So the first question asks for gender. I decide to answer male since, well, I'm male. The poll then skips me past anything of any sort of significance; they take my demographic and boot me out.

I have no problem with this, actually. But it makes me wonder: why take the demographic information at all? Were they, as part of this study, trying to compile demographic information on men who were a) curious enough to check it out and b) honest enough to say they're male? While I suppose that data would be an interesting note, I'm not sure how much use it would actually be.

I then considered answering as female, looking over the questions, and simply not submitting an answer. But then I noticed that even if you do answer as female, only one other question is still visible on that page; you submit an answer by definition just by answering that. Since I hadn't yet submitted anything (answering Question 1 as female doesn't submit an answer, but answering it as male does) I backed out so I wouldn't skew anything.

To be honest, I don't think that's a very good way of running an Internet poll. People should at least be allowed to look over the questions before they answer any of them, and their idea of skipping over irrelevant questions could have been done by other means.

Re: Interesting indeed...

[eredien]

I did find their way of skipping around questions annoying, and was curious as to why they picked LJ users as a whole as a test-group.

However, I thought the subject of the poll (myths and facts about cervical cancer) was important enough to stick it up on here anyway.