New Georgia Tech GVU web user survey out

Chris Lilley (Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr)
Thu, 20 Jun 1996 17:12:22 +0200


Rohit Khare writes:
> University study says Web constituency evolving
>
> The survey, which was conducted last month, of 11,700 people who use and
> write programs for the Web reveals that the number of women and minorities
> going online is increasing,

Nice if true, but ...

> The average age of the Web users surveyed was 33, and 31.5 percent of
> respondents were women, up from 29.3 percent in a similar study
> conducted at the school late last year.

Those GVU folks seem to have no grasp of statistics whatsoever. Unless
the sample size was *vast*, 29.3% == 31.5%. An extra 257 people were
women. Do they not realise that doing the same survey twice, at the
same time, would generate that sort of difference?

> Among programmers surveyed, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java
> programming language
> is gaining in popularity, with 58.1 percent of respondents who identified
> themselves as Web authors planning to use Java in the next year.

Probably because a Java applet can be used with zero
programming. Unless the respondents were the sort of folks who can say
"HTML programming" with a straight face.

> This was the fifth such survey conducted by Georgia Tech.

Yup. The first asked respondents if their browser supported forms -
using a forms interface to the questionaire ;-)

--
Chris