Wednesday, January 14, 2009

How does the outcome of questionaire affected by way questions being framed

We see lots of reports and analysis based on the survey results of industry and common people. They seems to give a great insight into the issue being faced by the audience and through a light on the possible solution for the same. But I doubt they can help anyone if the questions are being framed by novice or with some prejudice in mind. I discuss this one example that we are forced to discuss every year around this time.

Every year before the nomination for Oscar, almost all media channels in India start asking question from the audiences and viewer, "Can an Indian film win Oscar without foreign connection?" and then the possible options for answer given are "YES" and "NO". Sometime the third option is "Can no say". Anyway the third category does not matter much for the populist media. I think this is a question that can not be answered by the survey and on top of that the question being asked is irrelevant and misleading.

No doubt that the Oscar award carries lot of prestige in the international market but we should not forget that we do not compete in the award for the mainstream movies. We compete in the foreign movies category. Then our movie analyst start comparing the Indian nomination to the mainstream movies. The comparison is completely baseless. The movies that win the foreign movie category are generally very good in quality and content and most of the time Indian entry to the Oscar is based on the earning of the movie or the popularity of the actor in the movie. And most of the time bias is for Bollywood movies, or to say Hindi movies. These movies have much larger audience base in the country but I seriously doubt that they produce the best movies in the country.

The point I was trying to make with the example was that the survey can only help if the questions asked are being framed by who understands the problem and being asked in the right context. Just asking any question will give some answer that will be irrelevant and misleading. We should be careful in using the results from survey because otherwise we might feel embarrassed if being caught by someone who understand the context better than us.

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