Sometimes I think about going to law school, but then the realization hits that it probably means writing and receiving lots of letters like this:
James,
We are SurveyU, authors of the survey reproduced in your post of February
26th at http://jdel.tumblr.com/post/27338177. We are the sole author of the
survey and received no payment or other consideration from any organization,
including the one identified in your post, to create and distribute the
survey. It is our intention to publicly release our analysis of the
results.
We therefore request that you immediately amend the post to indicate those
facts.
Without regard to your incorrect inferences as to whether this constitutes
an attempt to architect attack strategies or create ‘push polling’, the
survey uses a number of constructs commonly used by psychologists to measure
attitudes toward race and gender (attached), and does not evidence any
pre-determined bias or desired result. We used these constructs to attempt
to measure whether race and gender are underlying motivators behind the
voting intent of college students.
In a separate section of the survey a series of statements made by Barack
Obama or Hillary Clinton were randomly assigned to one of the candidates or
the other. This research technique is used to uncover any underlying bias
that students have toward each candidate by seeing how the electability /
appeal ratings differ when the same statement is attributed to each of the
candidates.
Since you posted the article without any attempts to verify the accuracy of
your information, we’ve gone out of our way to explain the survey
methodology and intent to you, however, it appears that your motives are not
to understand the research, but instead to draw attention to yourself.
SurveyU is proud of its use of scientific methods of gauging college
students sentiment for the purpose of contributing to public discourse. We
have produced a number of surveys for this purpose, all of which can be
downloaded from http://www.surveyu.com/press_room.php
You are on notice that you have made false implications as to our
motivations and our intent. We request that you either remove the post or
reprint this letter in its entirety in the body of the post.
Dan Coates
—
Dan Coates, Co-Founder
SurveyU - The Voice of the American Student
t: 1-888-292-8855 x.2
f: 1-646-219-4399
e: Dan@SurveyU.com
www.SurveyU.com