No free lunch

Today was YouGov survey day, on this occasion mainly about my important face recognition and my television watching habits. Which made a welcome change from important brand recognition, one of the YouGov staples.

The opening section involved showing me 100 named faces, one after the other, and I had to say whether I recognised them or not, with the 10 above being the ones that I did recognise. I got the impression that quite a big proportion, say more than half, were faces of colour, so maybe colour was what the survey was really about.

Mostly it was easy in that I recognised neither name nor face.

In one or two cases I recognised both name and face. In one case - second from left in the top row - I thought I recognised the face (from television advertisements), although I did not know the name. In the other cases, I certainly recognised the name and could have said at least something about the person concerned. But I was much less certain that I could name the faces if presented without the names. On the other hand, certainly for the ten above, if presented as a heap of 20 names and faces, I am reasonably sure I could pair up the names and faces. Albeit, only managing second from left in the top row by elimination.

Some of these complications could probably have been covered off in notes, although I doubt whether many would bother to read many of them. I might some of the time, but probably not all of the time.

No idea how much any of this bears on the purpose in hand. Not much confidence that the YouGov question master worries overmuch about such things either.

The point being that even an innocuous sounding question like this one can still raise all kinds of tricky issues. But meat and drink to those superior question masters at the Government Social Survey, some of whom used to be colleagues back in the 1970's.

References

Reference 1: https://yougov.co.uk/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/brand-awareness.html. My last notice of YouGov affairs.