I just visited your survey. I note that nowhere did you make provision for the respondent to indicate that an item was irrelevant to his/her situation or opinions; consequently some of your statistical results will be rather heavily biased toward your default choices. You also did not supply any means of commenting, either about the survey as a whole or about particular parts of it (let alone particular items). For some of the items, I would have cheerfully left them blank, since NONE of the options available matched my situation; but your survey software rigidly requires the respondent to select one, and only one, of the alternatives supplied.
One of the most useful, if among the fuzziest, kinds of information available in any survey, especially in its early stages, is the set of commentaries that respondents make to it. I'm sorry to see that your survey did not permit any such information to percolate back to the investigator. You can, of course, still summarize the responses you're collecting. Just beware of supposing that they reflect the structure of things in the real world, especially for those items where the default choices occur frequently in your analyses. Probably OK for "a course paper" (although it wouldn't be if I were teaching the course), but definitely inadequate for, say, a Master's thesis, or for a real research project. In comparing your results with those of Hofstede, you might want to comment on whether Hofstede's work suffered (or may have suffered) from the same deficiencies as yours. (Of course, it may be hard to tell...) On Mon, 3 May 2004, Dominique Winther wrote: > Hello! > My name is Dominique - I am originally from Utah. I am an American > currently living, studying and working in Moscow, Russia. As part of my > studies, I have to write a course paper on a famous economic study - <snip> > I am doing an analysis on how US culture has changed relating to > cultural work-related values. I will compare my results with the > results done by Geert Hofstede 25 years ago. <snip, the rest> ------------------------------------------------------------ Donald F. Burrill [EMAIL PROTECTED] 56 Sebbins Pond Drive, Bedford, NH 03110 (603) 626-0816 . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
