Survey about places in Nottingham

[Paul_B 0]

I am a PhD student at the University of Nottingham extracting settlement classification from data harvested from the mass content of web pages. For example, my research has shown that 54% of data refer to Arnold as a suburb whilst 46% call it a town. In order to validate my work – I need to ask people in Nottinghamshire how they would describe specific places. I would be extremely grateful if any of your members were able to complete my questionnaire.

How would you describe different parts of Nottinghamshire? Fill in this quick survey (10 mins) to possibly win up to £50 gift vouchers:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZHSG7N

[Cliff Ton 10,467]

Done it.

One thought - it gets a bit boring eventually because it's the same thing over and over again.

[TGC 216]

Done it. Good luck.

[darkazana 1,736]

Done

[Donnyred 1]

Done

[... 1,411]

Could it be possible that this is a con idont know how but always a bit cautious

[Bilboro-lad 294]

My daughters a PhD student at Nottingham. She wouldn't dream of coming onto a forum and asking rather silly questions.

The people that do that are market researchers. That's their job. That's what they get paid to do. They nearly always pretend to be Uni students.

[mick2me 3,033]

Done

Chalesworth how can this be a con?

No personal info is entered the survey owner has a Notts Ac email?

[Bilboro-lad 294]

A PhD student needs control over collated figures. There's none in such a survey. My daughter is currently studying research methods and statistics - it ain't done like that.

Supermarkets are the main users of info about the population.

an advantage of .0025 over rivals still means a lot of money.

BYW I filled in the survey at random without looking - so the information is already flawed.

[mick2me 3,033]

So now ASDA thinks you know Kimberley is a city?

Thats frightening

[Bilboro-lad 294]

Most of the questions are bumph. It's the postcode that tells them what they want to know. You can find these daft surveys all over the internet. I see them in lots of forums.

[Paul_B 0]

I can assure you that I am a University student

The control is adjustment for age / gender / length of residency

I hope that they aren't "silly questions"

I can go into details on the rationale but do not wish to bias any responses

[darkazana 1,736]

#11 Bilboro-lad

I thought it was about the individuals perception and knowledge of different places, not just general data gathering. Thus providing quite interesting reading I would have thought.

[mick2me 3,033]

Paul

Thank you for choosing Nottstalgia, giving the members opportunity for input.

No doubt you will publish your results here

[mick2me 3,033]

Bilboro... I did not put my Postcode, its optional

[Bilboro-lad 294]

Where abouts would we find you at Nottingham Uni? What department? What sort of 'harvesting'? Why do you ask for the respondents postcode?

Exactly why are you making such a ludicrous study?

The control is adjustment for age / gender / length of residency plus postcode.

Now that's just the type of info that market researchers are using for their clients.

Sorry to be suspicious but I see these dumb surveys everywhere, they are pointless for genuine research as you have no control whatsoever on who or why the respondent responds, and ask three people to define a 'town or a 'district' and you'll get three different answers.

[darkazana 1,736]

Perhaps that's the point, seeing how people think of places as being!

[Paul_B 0]

If you are sceptical - please message my university account (as in the survey) and I will respond.

The postcode is useful for my PhD work which maps neighbourhoods and I hope it will validate my work

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~psxpb2/phd.html

and yes - it is optional

Sample size is a control by itself. If you ask enough people - many effects should be averaged out. I certainly do not want to ask only 3 people - that would be pointless.

The study is as darkazana states about perceptions of how different people can describe place. A probabilistic settlement classification may give a far more detailed account of different places that a static one categorised by say population only. I could bore you with more details if you'd like!

[Bilboro-lad 294]

Why does he want your postcode then? In what way does that add to the credibility of the survey?

[Bilboro-lad 294]

Feel free to bore me. Unless you describe exactly what a village, town, city, district etc is - then the results are meaningless. A village to me may be a town to others.

And how do you do this 'harvesting'?

[Paul_B 0]

The harvesting is by using the Bing API which is based on search engine results.

"A village to me may be a town to others" - which is exactly the point of the survey. Traditional settlement classifications are usually along the lines of: City / Town / Village / Hamlet with no flexibility of being multi-categorical. If you would like further details please email my university account (psxpb2@nottingham.ac.uk) and I will be happy to answer your questions there, rather than side-track this thread.

[Bilboro-lad 294]

So how many other forums are you spamming? Or is it just this one? Three results from this one plus one of nonsense that I submitted just to read the questions.

Not very scientific is it Paul?

[mick2me 3,033]

Paul did say he did not want to influence results by explaining the project.

If it had been considered spam it would have been quickly deleted.

[fch782c 144]

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/~psxpb2/phd.html

Me thinks if genuine then he and others within his study group (if he has one) may think twice about contributing to the forums in the future. I may be wrong but i think its genuine

See link

[Bilboro-lad 294]

He's researching something but I don't think we know what it is. The sample size in a single forum is way too small for genuine research.

Not only that, the research is completely flawed. If he trawls search engines for Arnold Town (as he says he has), most of those results will be about the football team, not the suburb/town/village/area etc. And he's still to explain why he needs the postcode.

"to assist comprehensiveness of local web searches (so if a user searches for a service within an named area - all services are returned even if the proprietor didn't specify the named area within their address information)"

He's probably working for Google or such like.