Читать книгу An Introduction to Text Mining - Gabe Ignatow - Страница 23

Social surveys are one of the most commonly used methods in the social sciences, and researchers have been working with online versions of surveys since the 1990s. Traditional telephone and paper surveys tend to be costly, even when using relatively small samples, and the costs of a traditional large-scale survey using mailed questionnaires can be enormous. Although the costs of online survey creation software and web survey services vary widely, by eliminating the need for paper, postage, and data entry costs, online surveys are generally less expensive than their paper- and telephone-based equivalents (Couper, 2000; Ilieva, Baron, & Healey, 2002; Yun & Trumbo, 2000). Online surveys can also save researchers time by allowing them to quickly reach thousands of people despite possibly being separated by great geographic distances (Garton, Haythornthwaite, & Wellman, 2007). With an online survey, a researcher can quickly gain access to large populations by posting invitations to participate in the survey to newsgroups, chat rooms, and message boards. In addition to their cost and time savings and overall convenience, another advantage of online surveys is that they exploit the ability of the Internet to provide access to groups and individuals who would be difficult, if not impossible, to reach otherwise (Garton et al., 1997).

While online surveys have significant advantages over paper- and phone-based surveys, they bring with them new challenges in terms of applying traditional survey research methods to the study of online behavior. Online survey researchers often encounter problems regarding sampling, because relatively little may be known about the characteristics of people in online communities aside from some basic demographic variables, and even this information may be questionable (Walejko, 2009). While attractive, features of online surveys themselves, such as multimedia, and of online survey services, such as use of company e-mail lists to generate samples, can affect the quality of the data they produce in a variety of ways.

The process of adapting social surveys to online environments offers a cautionary lesson for text mining researchers. The issue of user demographics casts a shadow over online survey research just as it does for text mining, because in online environments it is very difficult for researchers to make valid inferences about their populations of interest. The best practice for both methodologies is for researchers to carefully plan and then explain in precise detail their sampling strategies (see Chapter 5).