As I promised: why it took me so long to get ready with blogging adoption questionnaires
1. I was struggling with the method. Main choices I considered were:
- Survey (web-based): most of the questions are multiple-choice
- pro
- less time for the participants – better response rate
- I could quite easily make a list of answers even for the difficult questions like motivation (almost every blogger writes about it earlier or later :)
- easier to process
- contra
- risk of missing important choices (we are only discovering blogging)
- risk of suggesting answers that people would not think about themselves (especially with “would be bloggers”
- more difficult to prepare
- pro
- Interview (e-mail and/or phone)
- pro
- better understanding of important issues
- better ratio between bloggers and “would be bloggers” (those are rare between blog readers)
- I have to contact most of “would be bloggers” I know by e-mail in any case
- contra
- takes more time for participants (I mentioned to one of “would be bloggers” about 30 minutes and her reaction was convincing :)
- pro
There is another method I thought about – observation of bloggers. It doesn’t suit this specific study (I can’t observe “would be bloggers”, but I think that this is a great way to study: read weblogs, note posts about specific issues, extract and analyse. I wonder if someone is doing it.
Back to the choices:
- I decided for e-mail interview and I asked several people to comment on the draft
- I’ve got comments that it’s too time consuming
- I redesigned it: removed some questions and added multiple-choice answers where it doesn’t provoke new ideas
- Then I found out that in this format it would be more logical to have it web-based rather than e-mail based, so I made on-line version
2. I was struggling with the target audience.
In BlogTalk paper: would be bloggers I distinguished between professional weblogs and personal ones. After some comments it became clear that I was not convincing even myself, so I dropped it.
Then I also distinguished between three groups (note, this is the second iteration – there are two groups in the paper proposal):
- “would be blogger – 1″ – considering blogging
- “would be blogger – 2″ – trying out
- bloggers
What happened next:
-
I made three questionnaires and realised that I have same questions for “would be blogger – trying out” and bloggers.
- I realised that “considering blogging” may differ between “interested” and “decided to start, but still choosing right tools and hosting”.
- So, I made two questionnaires with some choices (the funny thing is that I ended up with 5 choice in total, similar to the stages of acceptance of innovation that triggered this whole study)
3. I also had some fighting with formulating questions to cover all what I wanted to know and my English :)
Tags: BlogTalk paper, researchArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/04/10.html#a532; comments are here.
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