Our knowledge manager sent me this article on Twitter the other day. She 's always pushing Twitter at me because she knows I don't get it and views that as some sort of character flaw. This article tries to answer the question on everyone's lips: why don't more teens use Twitter? The search for the answer causes the author to do a survey of teens with an N of 10,000. Well, actually it was even a few more than that. He shows us a bunch of graphs and some commentary. Then at the end he says this:
we surveyed. We don’t claim the 10,000+ survey results represent the
definitive survey of teens in the US. We do, however, claim that our
users look very much like the users of other social networks and that
our audience overlaps significantly with MySpace, Facebook, and
Twitter, and that the insights of myYearbook teens may be useful to
this analysis.
I thought, Wow! He gets it. And he's not even a survey guy, as far as I know. It made me think about the piece in a completely different way because he wasn't trying to make it out to be something it's not.
By telling us what it is he helps us to understand it better and ultimately, he makes it more useful to us. Now we can believe what he tells us and evaluate it. I think there is a lesson here about transparency,disclosure, and the usefulness of research results.
Comments
2 responses to “Disclaimers”
I’m still trying to get Twitter, at first I thought it was dumb but it is now proving to be somewhat useful way of keeping up to date with anything and everything (including survey stuff)
Incidentally, the article I sent you was something that was ‘tweeted’ (yes I’m aware how lame that sounds) by someone I follow on Twitter who is a social media person.