Many do. And the company paying for a survey might be marketing to a particular group and only want to survey that group. When I was a uni student, a statistics lecturer suggested that if we ever saw someone doing a survey at a shopping centre we should repeatedly walk past them until they asked us to complete the survey, so we’d see first-hand how surveys were conducted. It was surprising how many terminated the survey when I gave my occupation as uni student. I hear that these days, with paid online surveys, people will create multiple accounts with different ages, so that if a survey knocks them back based on their age, they can flip to a different account with a different age and see if that gets them paid.
Sometimes we’d see someone carrying out a survey on campus. If they didn’t look like a scientologist, chances were that it was a student in a 2nd year STAT unit about survey design, and they were field testing their own survey. And apparently 3rd year STAT students who had already done the unit would try to break their survey. They’d send in one person to do the survey and find out what the questions were. Then they’d pick a memorable question and agree on a particularly silly answer to give and they’d all go and do the survey giving that answer. So the survey might show that a particularly large proportion of uni students were members of the Judean People’s Front.
