Question

In mid-December of a recent year, the Internet service provider America Online (AOL) ran a survey of its users. This question was asked about Christmas trees: which do you prefer?” The response could be “a real tree” or “a fake tree”. Among the 7073 responses received by the internet users, 4650 indicated a real tree, and 2423 indicated a fake tree. Because the sample is a voluntary response sample no conclusions can be made about a population larger than the 7073 who responded. Identify other problems with this survey question. Find three other surveys that are based on a voluntary response sample and describe how it is quite possible that the results do not accurately reflect the

population.

Answer 1

Since the respondents of the sample are a voluntary response sample and they are also a self selected sample . that is only a particular users are selected for survey . the other issues relating such a survey are the cases of misreporting and that of limited prediction abilities . this is because sample cannot be used to make inferences under cases when population is greater than 7073 . Also the problem of biased reporting is an issue since it is an online survey . And responses may not reflect the general population . and there may arise a situation that many people may chose not to respond the survey .

examples for this type of surveys are , a newspaper posting a question on its website that ' how often do you seek medical information online? ' . of the internet users responded we cannot make a general conclusion here .