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To: J.T. who wrote (162628)	4/27/2002 2:08:23 PM
From: Oblomov	Respond to of 436258

J.T., the key to getting good survey results is randomization in the selection process. Further, you would want to have a random sample that (for the sake of argument) at least roughly matches the proportion in your population in terms of factors that might influence the results. For example, investors who use boards such as SI might have different attitudes than investors who do not. So you would want to control for this by making sure that you had respondents who use SI as well as those who do not. In addition, your sample size needs to be large enough to infer from your sample to the population with a reasonably high degree of confidence. Another point to consider is that the people who respond to surveys tend to have strong opinions one way or the other... there is no way to control for this in the sampling process, but you can adjust for it after the fact by giving more weight to moderate opinions. When bias enters the process, then what happens is that you will not know what confidence you actually have in your sample-to-population inferences... in other words, you might make the wrong conclusion about what people are thinking while believing that you made the right conclusion. Of course, doing a survey the "right" way is very expensive. Just food for thought.