Randomizing Survey Answers For Accuracy

Saint Aardvark writes: "The New York Times reports that two researchers at IBM have come up with a way to persuade people to give correct answers to survey questions: randomize the results. Strangely enough, they can get accurate information out of the aggregate of enough answers -- but it's completely anonymized. Since conservative estimates say nearly half of all survey answers are bogus, there's an interest in persuading people to be more truthful. As ever, you can use the Random NY Times Registration Generator to falsify your registration details and read the article..."

Comments

Re:Old trick

[AJWM]

Indeed, very old trick. (For my sins, in my earlier days I used to help PhD psych students run statistical analyses on their survey data.)

A variation on this is to give the respondant a die (ie, half a pair of dice), tell them to pick a number between one and six, and every time they roll that number, intentionally give a false answer on the survey. Thus, looking at any individual survey response, you don't know whether it's true or false, but you can factor in the 16.7% false responses into the statistical analysis.

Sure, that can be computerized, but as someone above pointed out, how does the respondant know he can trust it? The above old technique is entirely under the respondant's control.

Re:This is how it would work:

[80N]

95% of web users don't understand a lot of things, but if someone they trust tells them its OK then they will be happy.

I don't really understand how SSL works, but I trust my browser (a bit) and when I see https in the URL then I'm comfortable with that. Not because I fully understand SSL, but because I listen to the opinions of people who do.

So if it became accepted practice that pressing the Randomize button on your browser (why not build it into the browser) made your response anonymous then nobody needs to understand it any more than they do SSL.

Actually, why not have a new http method: POST-RANDOM instead of POST so the server knows that the data has been randomized.

80N

Re:I don't get it.

[DennyK]

Heck, usually it's LESS work to lie. Much easier to select the first or last option in a list than to hunt for the one that applies to you, or say you live in "dkjhgkjhdgs dshkjgdsh, AL" than to actually type your real address. And if they insist on cross-checking your ZIP and state, then what else is there except CA and 90210? ;) (Guess crappy TV shows can have their uses after all... ;) ) I'd love to see a study done about what % of visitors put CA/90210 for a state/ZIP in those places that do the cross-checking. That would give you a damn good idea about how many people lie like hell on those surveys... ;)

DennyK