Survey question
December 7, 2010 9:24 AM   Subscribe

I would like to price out a survey for an academic paper. Is it possible to see how many people list a certain interest or profession on facebook without paying for anything up front?

I'd also like to try to get a price quote for a month of advertising a SurveyMonkey served questionnaire to my target demographic. Is there a tool (provided by Facebook or otherwise) that gives firm numbers about this based on a certain demographic that the ad would be served to?
posted by codacorolla to Education (4 answers total)
 
I'd check with your IRB/human subjects folks. They know these things, IME.
posted by k8t at 9:28 AM on December 7, 2010 [1 favorite]


Yes, go to Facebook and click on "Create an Ad" on the right column just above the ads.

On the first page you have to fill out the ad text, just put "example example"

On the second page you can tweak targeting options by sex, area, interests etc. There's a realtime display of how many users fit your criteria.
posted by Tom-B at 10:47 AM on December 7, 2010


Response by poster: Has anyone used Facebook as a survey platform for academic purposes, and can you suggest anything? This is all speculative at this point, but I am curious...
posted by codacorolla at 11:01 AM on December 7, 2010


Best answer: Just do your lit review already!

The short answer is that yes others have done it - the big issue, among many, is that the data is only for self selected folks AND people who happen to be on facebook. Which you likely already knew. Another major issue is that most professionals are rather difficult to get to volunteer for any sort of survey, so your target group will need to be folks who will be sympathetic to your topic. A third issue that is that folks are very well attuned to the prestige of a web survey - if it looks like spam or product placement - your response rate will be practically none-existent.

Your institution, if it is sufficiently large, will have a survey lab of some sort, and many will provide an initial free consultation and are well worth whatever they charge. Your advisor will also be a wealth of information, even if all they do is refer you to someone else - shoot them an email. They can open doors you haven't even seen yet. IRB can be a slog - be well prepared - although if the q's aren't on hot subjects/medical then it should be straight forward, if a little time consuming.
posted by zenon at 12:19 PM on December 7, 2010


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