(please ignore previous posting)
> <snip>
> Internet users are not a random sample of any other population.
> Internet users who browse to a given site are not a random sample of
> internet users. And internet users who bother to fill out a form are not
> a random sample of anything. Your student will have data representative
> of a population whose nature he is just about completely ignorant of,
> and which he cannot determine. This is not science, and it is not made
> more scientific by using the newest toys to take the "sample".
If collecting data via internet is "not science" because of lacking
"representativity" then most current research in psychology, where
most samples are convenience samples of students, is "not science".
> My only advice is: tell your student that freedom from hard work is not
> a basic human right, and that just because doing research well is
> sometimes laborious, that is not an excuse to do it badly.
I see that the convenient way of collecting data via internet may lead to badly
designed surveys, and I have seen many of them. But I disagree that collecting
data online is "easy" or "bad" per se, and IMHO online samples are more
heterogenous than student samples and therefore offering a chance to get more
generalizable results in many fields of research than the often used student
samples.
Johannes Hartig
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