Nissan Leaf Owners Survey

[2k1Toaster]

I took the quiz but I feel that if you are not careful interpreting the results, you will be inferring a lot. Or if some are taking the quiz and inferring answers. FOr example if my girlfriend and I took this test, we would probably have different answers even though it is the same for both of us just because how it is worded.

For example:
a. How often does your driving distance exceed 100 miles in one day
d. If there is an additional vehicle in your household how often it is used for trips not possible in the Leaf?

I answered d as it is asked, "trips not possible in the Leaf". Considering most of the places I take my gassers have charge stations along the route or at the destination it is not a matter of not being possible, it is a matter of not wanting to bother with charging when I can just take a Prius and get there and back on a single tank of fuel. Last thing I want to worry about driving to the airport is running out of charge, or a downed QC station that makes me lose my flight for a weekend trip which we take almost every weekend.

Then the question that asks, "Considering each of the following vehicle attributes how do you believe your Leaf compares to a petrol powered car?" in regards to "Brand" and then ranks superior or not, I don't think that makes much sense. I believe the only car brand that this question would apply to is a Tesla. Nissan sells the Leaf, but they sell gas cars too. You are asking solely about the brand of the car, so is the brand improved just because they sell the Leaf? Other brands that also sell electric and gas and hybrids? Doesn't make sense. The option of "The Leaf is similar" is I suppose the "neither agree or disagree option" but again that is not what it says. Similarity is not the same as equality or negation.

There were lots of other little things like the social personality questions were awkward and nothing can be gleamed from such questons. No quantifying details were given, so everyone is going to answer relatively which doesn't work for an online anonymous poll where you need absolute numbers to correlate data.

And the occupations seemed tailored to someone working in the service industry or something. None of those are applicable to the majority of tech jobs.

 

[sxh993]

Hi 2k1Toaster,

You are right the questions can be interpreted in a number of ways. It is hard to produce a questionnaire that is interpreted the same by every single person that takes it. However, this isn't a major issue. The research isn't objectively looking at electric vehicle ownership, I'll try and explain with an example. If we take a journey that exceeds 100 mile, of course it is possible to do this journey in a Leaf and many drivers will do so. However some users may choose to use an ICE vehicle for this journey, for what ever reasons. With this in mind the questionnaire isn't looking into what the cars can do, its looking into how people choose to use their vehicles. The same kind of interpretation goes for the vehicle attribute questions.

In terms of not being able to correlate the data because of the answers. What typically happens is a number is assigned to each option e.g '1' for 'agree', '2' for 'neutral' and '3' for 'disagree'. By using this numbering system we can easily input the data into any statistical packages and get meaningful data.

I hope this helps abit, and thanks for taking the survey.

Scott

 

[sxh993]

Thanks for everyones responses so far.

If anyone knows of another forum site where I could locate Nissan Leaf owners that would be fantastic. Have tried Leaftalk also but have peaked at around 100 responses.

Scott

 

[2k1Toaster]

Hi 2k1Toaster,

You are right the questions can be interpreted in a number of ways. It is hard to produce a questionnaire that is interpreted the same by every single person that takes it. However, this isn't a major issue. The research isn't objectively looking at electric vehicle ownership, I'll try and explain with an example. If we take a journey that exceeds 100 mile, of course it is possible to do this journey in a Leaf and many drivers will do so. However some users may choose to use an ICE vehicle for this journey, for what ever reasons. With this in mind the questionnaire isn't looking into what the cars can do, its looking into how people choose to use their vehicles. The same kind of interpretation goes for the vehicle attribute questions.

In terms of not being able to correlate the data because of the answers. What typically happens is a number is assigned to each option e.g '1' for 'agree', '2' for 'neutral' and '3' for 'disagree'. By using this numbering system we can easily input the data into any statistical packages and get meaningful data.

I hope this helps abit, and thanks for taking the survey.

Scott

All of that is only possible if the questions are asked in a non-ambiguous way where every answer is answering the same question. The way the questions are worded, you can have people answering 2-3 different questions for each question. You cannot correlate that. So any conclusion from the data is already inherently flawed. This is why statistics and marketing people need to take more math and logic classes in uni...