What are Self-Selection Web Surveys?

Online surveys have a variety of benefits. They cost less to run and they allow you to reach a very specific audience. They also make data analysis easier and have plenty of options to make running the survey much quicker.

But online surveys and survey software can also be used online in many different ways. While the best method of completing research is to treat the online survey as you would any type of survey, using random sampling and strict methodology, there are other ways to complete surveys online. One of the ways is called “self-selection.”

Self-Selection surveys are surveys that a user takes because they have visited a site, clicked on a link, etc. The idea is that the individual managed to select themselves to take the survey because they were in the right place at the right time and completed some action that put them into a survey, like an advertisement at the bottom of a website that says “click here to take this survey.” Self-selection is used on a lot of different websites, often as a way of providing feedback to those that visited the site and had some type of site experience. They are extremely cost effective because you do not need to pay to find a sample – you can simply wait for people to visit the website and ask them to answer your questions.

There is a reason that companies can benefit from self-selection surveys. But when it comes to analyzing data and making decisions about a population, these types of surveys fall far short. Researchers have been studying how well self-selection accurately represents the population and the results come nowhere close .

For many companies, this means that it may be very dangerous to assume that the results you get from these surveys represents the rest your business – especially if your business is not entirely online. But if you are simply looking for feedback from your users about the website and its features, or you want to poll your users on information that you can use to decide to study further using surveys that involve more scientific methodology, self-selection surveys can still be fairly effective. They give you an easy and inexpensive sample to collect data from, and can still provide you with data that’s interesting, even if it may not be indicative of the rest of your customer base.