It’s been a very interesting, challenging, and exhausting week. I had planned to do a couple of blog posts but instead got myself into a controversy on the actKM list . The controversy began with a post by Doctor Leoni Warne,  on behalf of Doctor Elayne Coakes , with the simple request to “Please consider responding to the appended KM Survey”. A harmless enough and reasonable request you think, but how wrong you are! The controversy began in earnest with the sixth post, when David Snowden , the Alpha on the list, posted the following:

“Come on guys - we all know that these surveys are a game to get people degrees or for established academics to meet the performance criterial for publication in their Universities. In the main they have no value and arise from a perverted self-referential concept of research which is endemic in management and social science. However people's degrees and jobs are on line if they can't get them complete. Help them, fill it in (and random if necessary) but don't take it seriously”.

Now David has posted similar things in the past including comments along the lines of – “I tend to feel sorry for them and fill them in at random, or get my children to do the same. Given the lack of context on the questions random answers have the same validity as considered ones”. Knowing this I posted the following comment:

“I note this research has an international dimension. Perhaps the critics would like to tell me how one gets data from around the world, from multiple and diverse organisations, and from people you don't know or even know how to access, without doing a survey. I suggest survey research has some limitations but also has its place. Not everyone can do action research, and dare I suggest narrative techniques aren't always applicable or practical!”

This post opened up Pandora’s Box with the discussion morphing into multiple threads, discussing the merits or otherwise of survey research; veiled and not so veiled accusations that David’s random answer approach amounts to vandalism; challenges to my action research methodology, complete with suggestions it was flawed; a thread on how and how not to sell research; and a suggestion that actKM should provide a de facto quality and ethics service, and clearing house for past surveys (to satisfy the later requirement a Wiki has been established by Matt Moore ).

To give you an idea of the interest at 11:00 am AEST on the 23rd of February there were 103 public posts, and they are still incoming. The controversy began on the afternoon of the 20th of February. I have had 117 offline emails, so goodness knows what the real traffic is. (Oh by the way, for the individual who suggested my mother was of doubtful parentage, that I engage in dubious self-pleasuring activities, and that I have the “intelict [sic] of an Arabin [sic] camil [sic]”, I found the delete button on my keyboard most useful, along with the blocking function of my anti-virus software! Your email is the only one I did not respond to, and the only one of this nature.) But I digress.

David and I became involved in a long exchange, where he explained his position. The essence of his position is captured in this response:

“I do think that in the vast majority of cases randomly completing surveys has equal validity to attempting honesty for a variety of reasons, but principally this:

Any question has some form of hypothesis of the causal factors in the field of study. If I read the question but feel that the hypothesis is incomplete or two context dependent then there is no way to validly answer the question. For example "To what degree do you think trust is a key component in a KM programme?". There is no valid answer to this which is context independent. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, sometimes if it is it could not be achieved anyway. I could go on but I have made the point. I know that however I answer the question, the use of my answer will not produce a valid representation of my perspective.

In addition the conventions of response rates used by academics to justify their conclusions seem dubious to me. I think there are more related to what is possible, than what is valid.”

The discussion culminated from my viewpoint with a challenge to provide alternatives. He has reproduced my post and his answers , which rather than reproducing again I’ll leave you to follow and draw your own conclusions.

For me this was a very interesting exchange. I was disappointed that neither Doctor Warne nor Doctor Coakes defended their position, or the survey design. In fact only two academics entered the discussion, yet I know there are at least a dozen who subscribe to the list. Perhaps the discussion was too trivial to become involved in, or perhaps the design of the survey that generated the discussion was indefensible in first place? What I do know is there are quite a few people out there who think survey results simply don’t matter!

Regards Graham