I don't seek approbation for my behaviour - I wouldn't have adopted the van life if I needed it. I am interested in social attitudes and opinions though. Recently I've been completing a number of online research surveys, and I'm a bit shocked by the way they are worded to distort the responses, and how participants are deleted or dropped when they appear to be submitting unfavourable results.
If a company or organization of any kind is carrying out a study through the use of surveys to gather information and they decide their results are not of their liking and decide to purposely ignore information,.then the result they will get won't be a reflection of the social reality they are trying to understand in the first place, if so then the study and the data gathered is rendered useless for the purpose it originally served.
I would be interesting to me if you shared specifically what topics you got asked about on those surveys you mention.
many lobby groups use demographic data to pick whom should answer their surveys. you see it ll the time a couple test questions before the actual survey would begin to see if you qualify to fill in the survey
lets use a hypothetical(but could be real)
imagine a hotel chain thats not got god occupancy and on a near bankruptcy status wants to suddenly get bailed out by government grants..
they come up with an idea they want to lobby government to shelter migrants..
so they first look out for people that are anti-prison for low level crimes, they look for people that are pro migration. and then make a survey that asks such leaning people if migrants should be detained in prison or housed in hotels..
they gather hundreds of thousands of results and turn the results into a petition/lobby action to get migrants housed in hotels.. and bam. suddenly government is voting on rules/budgets to give hotel chain companies billions of £ to shelter migrants..
then a few years later greedy real estate landlords owning thousands of properties want a cut of that juicy money. so they formulate a demograph that would lean towards wanting landlords to house migrants. and so form a survey with such leaning questions.. they get hundreds of thousands of results leaning that way and bam, now have enough result to form a petition/lobby actions and bam we have government making rules/budget votes to pay landlords 5years of rent to house migrants