Highmark odd questions

[Fivestring63]

I got a letter in mail from Highmark which is part of my insurance. They said I could get a $5 gift card from Amazon for answering some questions. Sure, I use Amazon some, so I'll do it.

There were 9 questions and just about every question had to do something about if I was hispanic or any of my family was bi-racial and others along those lines. I answered them and got the $5 dollar gift card, but something is still kinda nagging at me about the questions they asked.

What do you guys think?

[Sam1]

Probably just for targeted marketing, but you really never know once the data leaves your hands that's why i dont mess with those things.

Besides most anthropologists agree that human genos originated in Africa, so technically you would be African-American as the description is "one who has origins from Africa".

So if you didn't check that box, you filled it out incorrectly anyways

[Guest Lester Weevils]

Dunno if it is odd or not. Sounds like maybe stuff they would legitimately want to know for marketing purposes.

An old prof from years gone by was a smart old bird who owned a market research biz. One time he was explaining the statistics. He claimed that properly targeted surveys can be deadly accurate with relatively small samples, but you have to carefully select a set of representative respondents then try to sweet talk as many possible into answering the questions. For instance, if your statistics need 1000 representative respondents for a certain level of confidence-- If some of your original pre-selected list of 1000 refuse to cooperate, you can't just keep picking more names out of the hat until you get 1000 cooperative respondents. According to the old prof, you get best confidence if you can sweet-talk your initial list into cooperating. Unfriendly or shy people who don't want to talk to a pollster tend to give different answers than friendly talkative people. Results can be seriously skewed if you only survey cooperative friendly people. In a serious well-done survey it wouldn't be surprising that a company would willingly pay respondents for cooperation. They pay big bucks for market surveys so they expect accurate as possible results.

Dunno if it happens nowadays but in the past there were door-to-door and telephone salesmen and scammers pretended to do surveys in order to sell their wares. In some localities it is illegal fraud for a salesman to pretend to conduct surveys. If the company wasn't asking identity-theft questions and the company wasn't trying to sell product, and the company was willing to pay for your time-- Fits with expectations of a legit market survey. Hmmm, dunno if it is illegal to pretend to do a fake political survey in order to convince cold-call voters. Plenty of that still goes on.