Bad Survey

As someone who used to conduct surveys, I am sympathetic when I get calls asking me to participate in one. Plus, I actually like taking surveys.

Tonight I got another call from the Nielsen people, asking me to take a television survey. First the guy says, "May I speak to Cathy.. F.... female?" I said, "Cathy F?" and he says "Oh.. no.. Cathy, the F is for female."

Ok, that's me! Then we get stuck on the first question: do I subscribe to cable TV? Well, I asked for a clarification, since cable TV sometimes means literally cable TV (e.g. instead of satellite), and sometimes it means non-broadcast channels.

He repeated the question. I said, Does it include satellite TV? We subscribe to satellite. He repeated the question. Finally, I'm like, I don't know, let's move on.

The next question? "Do you subscribe to a satellite TV service?"

Sigh.

He then proceeds to list every sport known to man, including 10 types of car racing I've never heard of, and wants to know how much I like watching them on TV, on a scale of 1 to 5. Since I don't watch sports on TV, I answered 1 to everything, though I really wanted a negative rating scale for things like hunting and fishing, which would be even worse than watching, say, football.

About 12 minutes into the survey, he suddenly says, "I am having computer problems. I will have to call you back." I ask him how much more there is of the survey and he says "I don't know.. my computer is having problems."

I think their survey technique could use some improvement.