Colorado Springs CitizensColorado Springs, CO, United States
Feb 2, 2016
Several people noticed that they were able to retake the survey several times on their computer. The City was notified of this flaw on Friday, January 29th. It's not yet been communicated how that will be handled, and no notice of the issue has been seen yet on the survey page alerting people to the flaw. If we hear more, we will update you. At any rate, if you took the survey prior to Monday, February 1st, which is when it appears to have been corrected, you should retake the survey. Though we have not heard an answer, the problem most likely was that the survey wasn't using cookie controls to identify a computer had already taken the survey. So, one could retake it several times. Even with cookie controls, respondents can clear their cookies and retake a survey ad infinitim which is a major flaw with Web based, anonymous surveys. The best surveys on matters of significance like election polling, television programming, etc. are conducting using area of probability designs which use sampling controls, but they are very expensive. Since this survey is anonymous, can be resubmitted several times by the respondent via clearing one's cookies and makes no attempts to have a balanced sample to the population of the area, it's data will be subject to enormous standard error. That said, one should take it nonetheless in case it is used in some meaningful way. Below is a link to the survey. We encourage you to ask about it as well. The initial survey results of the first survey which TOSC was hosting was abandoned due to these same flaws was shared publicly at the City City council presentation on the land swap. So, it stands to reason this will too as a form of demonstrating public support. We don't know how the data is intended to be used. You should raise all of these questions yourselves as well. For those who want to dig deeper into survey design, here's an article which touches on many of the challenges with Web based research. http://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1014/935 Thanks to several Colorado Springs citizens from all across the city who have research backgrounds for bringing up this important issue.
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