A recent tuition survey conducted by the student government is so flawed that it shouldn't have been administered, two ASU journalism professors said Wednesday.
But another journalism professor said the survey served its purpose: finding out what people think.
On Jan. 26, the Associated Students of ASU invited main campus students to log into the University's interactive Web site to take an online survey about a potential tuition increase. The Arizona Board of Regents will decide next year's tuition in March.
Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications Interim Director Steve Doig and journalism professor Ed Sylvester sent The State Press an e-mail regarding an article about the survey that ran Wednesday.
The e-mail said that the ASASU survey was not an accurate measure of student opinion.
Doig, an expert in journalistic social science research techniques, said a random survey conducted by phone would have been preferable.
Doig and Sylvester said since people take the survey by choice, not through a random sample, the results are not useful.
"It's better to do no survey at all than to do it badly," Sylvester said. "These people paid a lot for this survey but got nothing out of it."
Undergraduate Student Government President Brandon Goad, who made the survey available, said that the survey was not intended to be a scientific poll. Instead, it was an attempt to get ideas from students without spending excessive amounts of money, he said.
"I've never claimed that it was reflective of the student body," Goad said.
But even though the survey was designed for students, Doig said he successfully took the survey.
Anybody with an ASURITE ID can take the survey, whether they are faculty members or students, but nobody can take the survey twice.
Sylvester said that the questions should have been switched around to avoid a bias that causes people to prefer selecting the first item in a list.
George Watson, a journalism professor and research methods expert in the Cronkite School, said that despite a selection bias created by the lack of random sampling, ASASU made a valid and necessary attempt to get information from students.
Watson criticized a similar survey released by ASASU earlier this year regarding the Memorial Union expansion.
He said that that survey created a false impression that the survey represented the opinions of the entire student body.
But the tuition survey, Watson said, gave no such impression.
"The whole process of student government is self-selecting," Watson said.
Reach the reporter at: nicole.saidi@asu.edu.
