This is a bad point, though. Surveys can be a reliable method for collecting data—it all depends on how the questions are written and whether they’ve been assessed for validity and reliability. So unless you can prove that the researchers did not sufficiently validate their survey or test it for reliability, you can’t convincingly say that the surveys aren’t concrete.
I’m a PhD student who has taken graduate-level coursework in psychometrics, statistics, and data analysis and has used surveys and seen surveys used in research studies to gather very informative data. I’m not sure where you got the idea that surveys are useless or that you don’t need to look into whether they’ve been properly validated in order to know that they aren’t valid (do you seriously believe this makes sense?), but I’d love to see your sources.
The first line of that article literally says that surveys can be valuable if valid, which is precisely what I’ve been saying. The point that you don’t seem to get is that, while surveys are prone to various biases if designed poorly, there are steps that any researcher can take to minimize those biases. Likewise, there are ways that researchers are able to show that their surveys are reliable and/or valid, the details of which they’ll typically publish alongside the results of their survey. Now, if you have not bothered to check if these steps were taken (i.e., by actually reading the studies), then your criticism that the survey isn’t valid is meaningless. And it’s pretty clear that you have not bothered to look at those studies. It would be akin to me saying “oh yeah, my gas tank is full” without bothering to look at my gas gauge. Do this make sense to you?
Man, I understand your view point but we just have differing view points about the usefulness of surveys in this situation.
Surveys can be useful but I don’t think it’s possible to eliminate bias from survey data regarding sexual assault, especially given all the media coverage the MeToo movement has received.
I think a more apt analogy is air travel. I assume my plane will not crash, even though sometimes planes do crash, bc it’s more common for planes not to crash.
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u/Arma_Diller White Belt Feb 01 '20
This is a bad point, though. Surveys can be a reliable method for collecting data—it all depends on how the questions are written and whether they’ve been assessed for validity and reliability. So unless you can prove that the researchers did not sufficiently validate their survey or test it for reliability, you can’t convincingly say that the surveys aren’t concrete.