Thank you!

Over the next few posts I am going to tell the story of doing a survey using Twitter, and of the results. But I thought I would start with saying a great big thank you.

 I opened the short survey at 6.01pm BST on 19/4/2012. Initially I was using a free Survey Monkey account which limited responses to 100. They started coming in fast and furiously and I realised that the free version didn't even allow export of data. So I splashed out £24 to get the next level of account which allowed me 1000 responses for each survey in 1 month. This morning there were almost 500 responses. I set myself the challenge of trying to get 1000 responses in 24 hours.

At 6.01pm BST 20/4/2012 there were 997 responses. At 6.07pm there were 1000. 

(EDIT 21/4/2012 Actually I started designing the survey at 6.01pm but it only was finished and was published at 6.18pm. Therefore 1000 responses were in fact collected in 24 hours!!)

What does it all mean? The survey questions were about how people would like their doctors to introduce themselves and how they would like to be addressed by their doctors. After this survey how much more do we know? Should this have been a 'proper' research study? Should I have sought institutional ethics approval? I will try and answer these questions and any others that you think are important along with you.

You are my co-researchers. We managed to get this response because you participated and you recruited people into the survey. Now we can do the analysis together as well. 

Within an hour of the survey closing I started tweeting some of the main quantitative findings. I also made the decision to make the results available to participants after they took part so that they had a sense of the project they were working in.

Today I deliberately targeted male followers and asked them to share the survey. We managed to move from 65% of respondents being female to 57% at the end. We also managed to increase the percentage of older participants during the day. I has asked Age UK to share the survey and they did. I'm sure that helped.

So there are a lot of questions to be answered but now I just want to thank you for your help so far.