For many years conference speakers such as Virtual Surveys Pete Comley have been warning about the dangers of sites that advertise research surveys and panels and which advise people that they should do surveys to earn cash. This article looks at two of these sites and explores the implications for market research.
Surveys4Money announces that it is “The free Get Paid to Take Surveys Online Guide”. On its home page is a long list of panels, including such household names as Ipsos, Lightspeed, Synovate, NOP, Survey Spot, and Ciao, along with many less common names. On the home page most of the links are for US organisations, but there are special links to go to pages specialising in Canada, UK, and Australia.
The FAQ on the site talks about how much money you can expect to make by doing surveys. Whilst the site points out you unlikely become rich by doing surveys, they estimate that a realistic sum is “in the hundreds of dollars per month”. Clearly, to earn hundreds of dollars a respondent would need to do many surveys per month, probably 30 to 60 per month.
Even more worrying than promoting the membership of panels for quantitive surveys, Surveys4Money also advocate becoming a member of online focus groups, saying you can easily earn $100 per group.
PaidSurveys-uk goes even further than Surveys4Money, in that it offers a chance to download roboform. Roboform helps the budding respondent fill in their answers automatically, mainly things like the demographic questions. Roboform also has a multiple identities facility that allows people to readily switch between different membership profiles.
The thought that many of the people taking market research surveys might have been recruited via these sites and might in some cases be taking 50 surveys per month, using multiple identities, will give many researchers pause for thought.
The key question is not whether this process is in some sense ‘morally’ right, but whether it makes any difference. So far, studies that have looked at regular versus infrequent respondents or at people who say they are more motivated by rewards (compared with people who say they are trying to influence brands and decision makers) have showed very few differences. However, this may not continue in the future, and it behoves researchers to keep reviewing this point.
One tip, from a regular user of online panels, is to include one or two questions which you already know the answer for (age and sex are fairly easy), to check the panel member is consistent with their stored profile.
Remember the two sites featured in this article are just two amongst many. Most panels have open membership, and as long as they have open membership there will be sites telling people how to find them. So, these sites, and the implications of the people they recruit, are going to be a fact of life for all of us for the foreseeable future.
I've just discovered this nice blog. Congratulations Ray. I'm glad to see that the research industry embraces blog posting as a communication tool. (Check our blog too: http://solucionesnetquest.com/actualidad/ In Spanish, though)
As you said, I think that the actual problem is not this kind of sites but open membership or passive recruitment. ¿Should the industry establish active recruitment "by invitation only" as a standard methodology for online access panels?
Posted by: Enric Cid | August 28, 2006 at 07:30 PM