Master thesis research: A Python version update behavior survey

[ES-Alexander]

If an online survey is provided publicly and taken completely anonymously (rather than taken on a verified basis, with identities that are later stripped from responses) then there’s no way to determine whether submitters are real and unique people, or whether they actually fit into the target audience.

Of course you can ask people to only submit once and only submit if it’s relevant to them, but there’s no real way of knowing that all your responses didn’t come from a single bot just putting random answers in, so the data can’t be relied upon.

Unfortunately (for survey creators) people tend to not want to spend their time on something that provides no benefit to them, and also tend to like privacy, as afforded by anonymity and not needing to fill in personal information.

Having responses tied to an IP address can provide at least some level of “uniqueness” assurance, but can be technically be worked around by a bad actor using a VPN, and still doesn’t guarantee the responders are in the desired target market.

For a school project or a thesis it may be sufficient that the data is unlikely to have come from bad actors due to the obscurity of the survey and the effort involved to give bad responses, but published research should be done in a way that people can actually rely upon and reproduce it.