Fake Emails & Survey Quality

In order to be part of an online survey, you need to get the person's email address. At a grocery store, for example, they ask you to fill out a form in order to get a club card, and then occasionally they use the email address on that club card to send customer satisfaction surveys. It's a nifty system, but it has a problem – many of the email addresses you receive are going to be fake, and that could affect your data collection abilities.

By "fake," we're not talking about email addresses that simply don't exist. These email addresses do exist, and the user may actually check them on occasion. No, what we're talking about are email addresses that are not the person's primary, real email address.

Rather, these email addresses are what some people like to call "spam email addresses" – email addresses people use when a company request their email and they don't want to be spammed at their primary email address. A large percentage of the population uses a spam email address these days, because signing up for an email account is free. They may or may not check that email address with any type of regularity, because it's only to fill out forms – not to correspond with people or businesses.

Fake/spam email accounts may cause some problems with your data collection. These include: Demographics – Some people are more likely to use fake email addresses than others, and those people are less likely to fill out your survey. If they have specific characteristics (such as being young, intelligent, or tech savvy), you may not get a representative sample.

Sample Size – It's tough to figure out how to get the right sample size if you don't know exactly how many people are going to be receiving or responding to your survey. Planning for potential spam email addresses can be hard, especially because these email addresses are occasionally checked by those that provide them. While your goal is to reach your sample via email, you may not truly know that the email account you're sending the survey to is the person's primary email account.

If it isn't, you may not get the response rate you were hoping for, or the representative sample you wanted. It's not a serious issue that should concern all researchers, but it is one that shouldn't be forgotten as you conduct your research.