All I Don’t Know About Surveys

I believe my survey experiment Survey Time illustrated later in this post and in Google’s Visualization of Survey Responses mainly pointed out how ignorant I am about the very complicated science of surveying from building the survey to the visualization of the results.  Thanks very much though to all the fine folks who responded, and I’m always open to suggestions through this survey or the traditional methods of commenting, Twittering, or emailing.  I also really appreciate Markus Gesmann’s post Feedback from vignette survey for giving me the idea and Michael Friendly’s http://datavis.ca/papers/casm/casm.pdf for helping me think through the visualization.  I have not had a chance to read, but

this appears to be the Bible of survey and non-quantitative visualization.  Also, I got a big kick out of this Advanced logo: a language for learning since at 7 seven years old the Logo turtle introduced me to programming and assured my destiny of a lifetime of geekdom.

Unfortunately, this visualization is not my most stunning or best work, but I wanted to make sure that I shared for anyone that might find it helpful or inspirational.   There are lots of ways to get Google Docs into R, but I choose the easiest and least elegant.  Google allows publishing to the web as csv.

From TimelyPortfolio

From TimelyPortfolio

Then we can simply use the base read.csv file to access the results to get the following visualization of the survey.  If you want to see the full set of results, go to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AieeEIaS0AOsdGpvbTltd0pLZGh1cjRjZnlaV3pVY1E.

From TimelyPortfolio

R code in Gist (click to download)  One comment recommended that I do not show the code in the post.  Please let me know if you agree or disagree.

Thanks again to everyone who responded and all my loyal readers.