I’m a Ph.D. health economist, now retired. I have significant professional experience in both conducting and analyzing surveys. I’m only bringing that up so that you’ll know that I have the bona fides to discuss what does and doesn’t work in surveys.
And I don’t think it’s very smart to do what the title of this posting says. That is, to use a low-quality survey to make decisions affecting roughly five billion dollars’ worth of residential property in the Town of Vienna.
But that’s exactly what the Town of Vienna is doing.
Worse, for a few hundred dollar’s worth of post cards and stamps, they could easily check the results of their low-quality survey.
But I’m betting that they won’t do that.
Read on if you want to know further details. First, I’ll describe the Town’s survey and the risk they take in accepting the results. Then I’ll describe how, for a few hundred dollars, they could avoid that risk entirely. And why they really, really ought to want to do that.
No screeds this time, other than to point out that I’ve been saying the same thing for years now. And that we used to have people on Town Council who understood the basics of surveys. But apparently we don’t any more. Or they aren’t speaking up. And that’s a pity. Continue reading Post #1090: Making decisions about $5,000,000,000 worth of private property based on a $400 self-selected internet survey.