Monday, August 18, 2008

Priming Surveys

Checking out frogmetrics.com and thinking it is really cool, but reminds me...

How many times have you seen a survey with the answer being from 1-10 or 1-5 stars? Every time I come across one of these I always wonder how in the world they aggregate these responses in a meaningful way. A very level person will answer most things close to the center (every thing is a 4-6) where a excitable personality tends to hit the extremes. They both likely meant the same thing by their feedback. The same thing goes with netflix movie rankings for example, and then they try and give me recommendations based off of what other users felt. Problem being is that the level heads and the excited are all mixed in together.

So is there a way you could get a sense of what personality they are to help classifier their answers? What if you asked a single question somewhere in the survey that was a "primer" question. Something that has a decent emotional response, like how would winning 100 dollars make you feel 1-10?