Take the “Cat Person or Dog Person?” survey!
It’s an exercise in classification and survey design, for your own enjoyment. It should take about a minute of your time. Feel free to share.
The survey is also embedded below the fold. You may also just view the results.
Can I do the poll again?
I want to change some of my answers. Especially the ones about cats.
Nothing’s stopping you from taking it as many times as you want!
At the time I am looking at the results, there seems to have been 188 responses (not necessarily from unique individuals). One response is intriguing, and it so happens I must be the outlier in that response.
Unfortunately, the results don’t unambiguously label the different questions, making it a bit awkward to refer to them. The response I’m taking about is the “I am awake” question, which, at the current time, has 187 replies. The one missing reply is me. Deliberately.
I took the position I would only answer non-optional (i.e., marked-as-mandatory) questions. Anything not so marked did not get an answer. (I tried to make any answers I did give consistent.) The “awake” question was not marked as mandatory, so I didn’t answer it. (I also did not test if the mandatory-markings were correct, I simply assumed the mark was true and answered those, and only those, questions.)
So why only answer mandatory questions? Partly to be perverse. And also to hint at my belief write-in answers (of which there was only one) are essentially always ignored. An incident from a few years ago suggests why I am very distrustful / dubious about write-in survey answers:
This was at Big DummieCo, where I then worked. The IT support group once circulated a survey asking how they were doing. The were only two or three questions, along the lines of:
Q1. What do you think of our service?
○ Excellent
○ Very Good
○ Good
Q2. How quickly did we solve the problem?
○ Immediately
○ Very Quickly
○ On Time
Q3. Any comments?: (write-in)
I was infuriated by how badly that survey was “designed”. Yes, it really did exclude any possibly of the service or timeliness being unsatisfactory! I wrote a long(-ish) essay in reply to the third question — using the “write one to throw away” method to vent my anger the first time and produce a more calm measured response the second time (which was the answer returned with the survey). I included examples of responses (with citations) which were not-at-all timely, and also where they very blatantly did not do / “solve” what was asked. And the zinger: At the end, I broke my anonymity and said something like, “As you can see, there are multiple issues here. I predict the understanding of this essay will become another issue. So a simple test: Please e-mail me to confirm you have read this answer. That’s it. Just e-mail me at (e-address). My prediction is I will not be e-mailed, in which case the obvious interpretation is this answer was not read.”†
You can guess what didn’t happen…
(I presume — this is a guess on my part — a graph representing the responses to the first two questions was later presented to management / executives as “proof” of how well they were doing…)
† I am aware there are other possible interpretations, including the essay being truncated, some sort of a rule precluding e-mail contact, and so on.
@blf,
My default expectation is that nobody reads the feedback.
Although personally, if I were analyzing a survey and one of the write-ins asked me to e-mail them, I would 100% ignore it. After all, the point of a survey isn’t to prove a point to respondents, it’s to collect data. Well, okay the cat & dog survey is definitely trying to prove a point. And the Big DummieCo survey obviously isn’t interested in collecting real data. But still.
I like to think I’m a people person but they won’t let me keep people as pets. 🙁
My other joke response…
Fortunately neither and am happy about my lack of a snout and tail.
Cats. No, wait…..
Dogs, yeah definitely dogs. Wait…..
OK, cats.
No, dogs.
Wait….
What about the chipmunks?
Why must I be labeled?
(I did read the feedback. I wanted to see the write-ins.)