Badly in need of participants for doctoral research survey

As part of my doctoral program, I am conducting a survey among adult Social Media users to analyze their consumer behavior. No special skill or knowledge is required for this survey. This survey is totally anonymous; you don’t need to provide any personal information. I would appreciate if you could complete the survey and forward it to others (friends/ colleagues /relatives). This survey takes less than 10 minutes.

I am badly in need of your support because my research is on-hold because of data. Here is the URL of the survey:

https://alliant.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6yPu2FlDlrXxFuB

Thank you very much for your help.

 

Done

I filled it out... Good luck....

 

I see this kind of thing frequently in doctoral dissertation work. I don't profess to know this particular project, but three serious questions come to mind.

First, what population is being represented by the sample collected?

How can one make inferences about a population when the sample may or may not resemble it?

How can one make inferences about a population when the sample isn't randomly selected?

As far as I can tell, when this approach is used, one can only make statements about the people who participated. That's descriptive statistics, but it doesn't tell us about the population because it isn't drawn from one. Again, I say this with caution since I haven't read the methodology. But how would a population be described so that taking a non-random sample (anyone who reads the plea for participation and takes the survey) from it would be revealing? I just don't get it.

"A bunch of people took my survey and here are the results. I can't say anything about the applicability of these results to anyone besides the people who took it." Not exactly doctoral stuff. But again, I see it all the time.

 

Sure, but it's a judgement or convenience sample, not a representative one. If you want to learn the opinions of nurses, for example, and there happens to be a conference with 5,000 of them down the street, you'd be crazy not to do a lot of interviewing at the conference. Will it be representative of all nurses eveywhere? No. Will it give you an interesting set of opinions to work with? Sure. Used with the appropriate limitations noted, and when combined with other data collection methods, it's a valid approach.

I agree with your observations about not being able to project the data to a population with any kind of known accuracy though. Groan - I'm so glad to be done with all that stuff!

 

And to the OP - I did the survey. Good luck!