By Jorge Chavez

People being paid to fill out the online survey questionnaire are a bit self-conscious about giving their opinions. They may say defensive things such as, "Hey, I don't know! That's just my opinion. Someone else might think differently!" or, "Who am I to say? Who am I to decide that?"

They need to understand the principle of opinion sampling. The principle of sampling states that with a more or less homogeneous population, a sampling of a representative few will accurately reflect the whole population within a few percentage points. To get more accuracy, take bigger representative samples.

That means, for example, that if a mayonnaise packer and seller desires to know what percentage of the people in Pennsylvania prefers lemon flavored mayonnaise over other flavors, they do not have to ask everyone in Pennsylvania! If they ask a representative sample of Pennsylvanians, say 1,500 to 3,000, which mayonnaise they prefer, they can project the results onto the entire population within a 'margin of error' of between 2.5 and 4%. That's close enough for most marketing planning purposes.

So when you receive an invitation to take a survey, do not worry about what other people might think or say. Your survey info is part of the sample they are taking. Chances are if you think a certain way, there are others who feel the same way. Just give your honest opinion. The survey maker does not care if you are in the 90% group or the 10% group. What they care about is whether the opinions are split 90-10, or 10-90, (or 60-40!).

When people make buying decisions, the only valid opinion is their own, which is only fair, and entirely correct. After all, they are buying the product for themselves, with their own money! So they will act based on what they honestly think. And that reality is what the market researchers want to know.

All opinion surveys, of whatever type, use this same basic principle. It means that to know fairly well what a large group thinks, you do not have to ask all members of the group, just a small representative sample.

This is what makes it possible to find out what people think in an economical way and it makes surveys of all types, including paid online surveys, work and yield valuable information. Because of this, the Market Research people can afford to pay 2,000 people for their opinions because that tells them what maybe 4,000,000 would say if they asked every one! When they pay the 2,000 their $20.00 each for their opinions, it is really only costing them a penny each to know what the 4,000,000 would say!

What is the bottom line? Take the paid online surveys offered to you, give your honest opinion, whatever it is, and take your $20 fee proudly, knowing that it saved someone somewhere a lot of money even if it did only take you 10 minutes to fill out!

Jorge Chavez is an experienced business analyst at: http://surveysentinel.ya23.com To learn more about making money with paid online surveys visit: Paid Surveys (http://surveysentinel.ya23.com/) To learn more about comparing paid survey companies to pick the best for yourself, visit: Paid Survey Review (http://surveysentinel.ya23.com/Rankings.html