Take part in a UC Berkeley survey about women's cycling

[rmzgr]

Hello everyone!
I'm with a group of marketing researchers at UC Berkeley and we're trying to understand the women's bike market and what it takes to get even more women to start cycling.
Please fill out this 5min survey: https://berkeley.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_eEdNirNP90WELBP


Many thanks
Ralf Metzger

Haas School of Business
University of California, Berkeley

[velo]

I like to participate in these sorts of things, but I do my homework first. There is no Ralf Metzger at UC Berkeley based on the directory. Before clicking any links here, gals, I'd be cautious. Personally, I won't click the link unless there are better credentials provided. Just sayin'...

[Artista]

Thanks for the heads-up, Velo.

[malkin]

The research methodology is dubious anyway.
With an arbitrary collection of survey respondents solicited from an internet forum, I'm not sure what information could be gained and few conclusions could be made. Maybe respondents from a women's cycling forum are more pro-cycling than respondents from a guns and ammo forum.

Let's see the Institutional Research Review Board approval.

[Owlie]

There is a Ralf Metzger, but he appears to be a physicist, from the Netherlands...

[malkin]

There is a Ralf Metzger, but he appears to be a physicist, from the Netherlands...

Maybe he's doing a distance learning MBA.

[Eden]

I would make a bet he is a student and he is probably legitimate. These surveys though.... they usually focus on generalities that I find to be pretty ridiculous and not what I'd tend to think would be really useful for a bike manufacturer to figure out how to get more women to buy their bikes.

[pll]

Let's see the Institutional Research Review Board approval.

The quality of the survey is poor -- no knowledge of cycling, it seems (or a lot of stereotypes involved). This looks like yet another survey for a research methods in marketing study. Such studies are not conducted to generate generalizable knowledge (nor do women in an internet forum constitute a protected population), so IRB approval is not necessary.

[nuliajuk]

At least he doesn't lump everyone over age 45 together, as a similar poll on a posted on masters swimming website did! Trust a 19 year old to assume that a 45 year old is exactly the same as an 85 year old.
I agree that a poll designed to figure out how to get more women into cycling should probably not be posted on a women's cycling forum. Asking people who are already cyclists, some for decades, is probably not going to help determine how to get a non-cyclist interested.

[pll]

At least he doesn't lump everyone over age 45 together, as a similar poll on a posted on masters swimming website did! Trust a 19 year old to assume that a 45 year old is exactly the same as an 85 year old.
I agree that a poll designed to figure out how to get more women into cycling should probably not be posted on a women's cycling forum. Asking people who are already cyclists, some for decades, is probably not going to help determine how to get a non-cyclist interested.

A lot of the class surveys posted here are from MBA classes. The median MBA student is 28 years old, so we should expect and demand more nuance and sophistication from these surveys. I went through the first couple of screens of the survey in this thread and it was a litany of stereotypes (take the questions about visiting a bike shop: is it tidy and cute? other people shopping there? is the sales person knowledgeable about women's bikes? etc). Anyway, these students need to do some work before putting together a survey and releasing it in the wild.

If the original poster is reading, which I doubt: in statistical analysis, whether it is marketing or any discipline, garbage in means garbage out! Before doing a survey, you need to do research and test that the questions are well thought of.

ETA: And one more thing to all MBA student posters: never suggest that you are a researcher -- you are not and suggesting that you are is misleading. Real research requires approval from your university's Institutional Review Board. If the study has an IRB approval, it should be on the first page of your survey, together with the IRB contact information to report possible violations/problems. If the study is for a class, you need to state that clearly.