I certainly think there are people for whom this would be a bad idea, and I certainly think one should first pause to ponder the impact on the potential respondents (I had several layers of easing into the topic, from email subject line to email message saying “there’s a survey” to then the survey itself, and this was still not quite enough to prevent one person on my list from having a Rough Day as a result).
But in general, i.e. for more than half the people out there, I think this is a really powerful learning experience and a good thing to at least consider trying. I very much am glad I did this and I think most of the people I know personally would benefit if they did it, too.
I do think that if I did this my responses would be more biased than yours because I would not be willing to send the survey to all the people I have contact info for, in part due to concerns kind of like this. But even biased data would still be interesting and useful, probably.
I’m now tempted to run such a survey of my own...
I certainly think there are people for whom this would be a bad idea, and I certainly think one should first pause to ponder the impact on the potential respondents (I had several layers of easing into the topic, from email subject line to email message saying “there’s a survey” to then the survey itself, and this was still not quite enough to prevent one person on my list from having a Rough Day as a result).
But in general, i.e. for more than half the people out there, I think this is a really powerful learning experience and a good thing to at least consider trying. I very much am glad I did this and I think most of the people I know personally would benefit if they did it, too.
I do think that if I did this my responses would be more biased than yours because I would not be willing to send the survey to all the people I have contact info for, in part due to concerns kind of like this. But even biased data would still be interesting and useful, probably.