When you look at a few personal financial blogs or sites you will find them conducting online surveys to arrive at any decision. But will they represent the true story or will they meant to believe?
Once any blog or site owners think themselves as settled in terms of the online reach then they conduct online surveys to judge how people act. But what negative impact they are depicting on society or readers? With few lakhs of readers and in that only few hundreds participation in actual survey how they can judge that their survey represent population?
Especially in the Indian context where internet access is still at a nascent stage it’s hard to believe those surveys. Even if we believe internet reach is so high then how many Google it for personal financial knowledge? This percentage actually represents too low in India. Sad to say that none of these sites will give a caution that survey they conducting will not represent the whole population.
So it is totally a negative image what these sites are actually trying to show. If any media which is so high in reach did some surveys then we can believe it. But being less than few lakh penetration and survey participation less than 10,000 is actually a disaster to new visitors who may believe and do according to that survey.
Next time when you come across any such surveys conducted by few sites, first look at the data participation then takes your call. An examples of such online surveys are as below.
- Best banks in India
- Best online term plan to buy
- Best insurance company in terms of service
- How you hire a planner?
- How you chose the product for investments?
- Will stock market reach its high within one year?
Points to take care before blindly following.
1) As said above, first look for the participation number. I suggest to outrightly reject if participation is less than a thousand.
2) Take the idea what they shared. But never follow blindly.
3) Do some other search on the same topic.
4) Sum up all the data and arrive at your own decision.
5) Finally never stay away from such surveys. Instead participation will actually bring the true picture of such surveys.
bemoneyaware
A well raised point. Survey just indicate a trend..it should not be taken as face value for reasons mentioned in your article.
Another doubt I have is whether people really give true answers..I mean when someone asks “How are you?” We all say we are fine even if we had a fight with children,parents,boss,traffic!
Basavaraj Tonagatti
bemoneyware-Thanks for sharing this thought too. Yes we used to have two different answers when someone asks us like “Tell me something about you”. So it just resembles what we are to outer world rather than what we are in reality.