Our inboxes have been saturated with surveys, and it’s having a desensitizing effect.
When you first think about it, sending a survey to many people by e-mails isn’t a bad idea. Unfortunately, too many have copied this idea, corrupting the entire process of surveying. If you get surveys in your inbox all the time, are you going to keep caring about them? You lose interest, wanting the barrage of questions to stop.
Surveys have become a sort of spam. And when this happens, surveys are just another cheap trend. This is especially evident on Web sites like tickle.com and quizilla.com. However, more students would probably be more willing to take those than the ones received by school e-mails.
The problem starts with usefulness. Although some surveys serve purposes for MSU, some of them are just for the researchers’ benefit, which makes the surveys less appealing and less important to us. Sure, it’s good that someone wants our input. But we want to talk about things that affect us.
Another problem is the length of surveys. Some questionnaires take up to 30 minutes to finish, a ridiculous amount of time to spend on something that you get in an e-mail. Surveys should be shorter and shouldn’t take too much effort to fill out. Otherwise, you’ll have people who won’t finish the surveys even if they’ve started on them. We have short attention spans; brevity is a must, particularly when we have school and work to worry about.
Of course, people can be enticed with possible gifts to fill out a survey. The library survey offered a chance to win a free iPod. While this may get more people to participate, it would definitely take away from the accuracy of the answers. The emphasis should be on the information, not the prize.
This recent flow of surveys is discouraging students from giving out potentially important information. Things need to change to accommodate our interests and time. If not, then these surveys will continue to fall by the delete button.
The Reflector editorial board is made up of opinion editor Jed Pressgrove, news editor Sara McAdory, assistant news editor Wade Patterson, sports editor Ross Dellenger, entertainment editor Tyler Stewart, managing editor Dustin Barnes and editor in chief Elizabeth Crisp.