
Ask HN: How to reach a lot of people for a master thesis questionnaire - guddal
I am student in psychology and want to ask some programming people some questions. Is there a way to reach a lot of people? The questionnaire do not take more than 20min.
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drallison
Presumably you want to use the results (statistics) of your questionnaire as
data to prove or disprove some hypothesis. How you choose your sample will
determine whether your results reflect the actual population. You should
consult a good statistics text to learn about selecting your sample. Self-
selection is generally not a good strategy.

How you frame questions in your questionnaire will also have a significant
impact on the answers you receive. If you expect to rely on the answers, you
need to study and characterize the questions. Wording and grammar and question
redundancy are important. Questionnaires need to be validated experimentally.
There is, of course, a substantial literature on questionnaire formulation.

One more thing, p-value tests of significance, once the gold standard, are now
controversial (at best) and discredited (in some circles).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value)

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ordu
GoogleForms

[https://www.google.com/forms/about/](https://www.google.com/forms/about/)

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guddal
Thats true but I do not have so many contacts, to send them the link to the
form. I need a platform to post the link. :-)

~~~
ordu
Is it the only difficulty?

I didn't do that, but I know person who did. He just posted link to his
questionnare in the FB publics devoted to psychology. He asks his contacts (he
is also have not a lot of contacts) to repost, describing how it important to
him. It allowed him to gather a few hundreds of participants in a week.

As for my thoughts, I think that it is important to make a short introductory
description of questionaire, to tell potential participants why this research
is important. Motivation is very important. It would be great if after
answering questions participant will be rewarded, for example, if you tell
him/her something interesting for him/her. The most of participants have a
hope to learn something about himself, if you can give him feedback of this
kind, based on questionaire, I belive, it can help to attract more
participants. Alternatively you can promise them feedback in the future after
data processed. It can help, I participated one time in such a research.

