www.CostaRicaTicas.com

Gosh, we have grown. I thought I was late finding the board when I joined as member #168. I now see 3000+. I would be very curious to see an updated poll. We did one a long time ago; in infancy. Some question suggestions:

1) Have you actually ever been to CR?
2) How many times?
3) Age survey.
4) Hotel survey. eg: Have you ever stayed at the following hotels: (list). How would you rate them for quality, 1 to 5 stars.
How would you rate them for value, 1 to 5 stars.
5) From what country are you from? What state? Average times visited per year?
Average length of stay in the gulch?

The board members could certainly come up with more and better questions. Any professional pollsters in the group?

I suspect many of our 3000 are voyeurs and have yet to travel. IF we really have over 1000 active associates regularly frequenting the scene, we can have positive influence... promoting good attitude, while keeping our paradise in line with affordability.

For local residents: an assignment: get semi-scientific (I know, I know, hard to do in a drunken stupor). Start working on getting some idea as to just how many different guys visit the Marlin over the course of a month. How many of them may be US?

And lastly: Could there be even a single female member among us? An article from the "other side" might make an interesting read!

I agree. I would like to see the results especially if the respone was decent. Wile Coyote

There was a single female member but she asked to be removed and delisted.

Gopher, those would all be very interesting questions to know the answers to. The problem with using polls to draw any valid conclusions around here are the notoriously low participation rates in such polls. Normally, valid conclusions can be made based on surprisingly small representative samples. For example with a population of 3000 one can make conclusions accurate to within +/-10% with less than 100 responses.

The problem is that the sample drawn would wind up being highly unrepresentative. You'll probably get few if any of the lurkers that seem to make up the vast majority of board membership. We don't even know how many of what appears to be "lurkers" are really just members who were just one-time visitors or members who have since moved on and no longer visit this site at all. As you have noted those groups are probably much less likely to have been to CR, though some probably have. Of those that I'd guess would be more likely to participate, most have either been to CR or, like Coqui, plan to rectify that situation shortly.

Another possibility for collecting the information you seek, would be to have all new members answer a simple and brief questionaire when they sign up. The problem with that is that it leaves the problem of how to get a thorough or representative accounting of the existing membership. I'm guessing a larger portion of regular CR goers are already enrolled here than would exist with those that sign up from here forward.

Any other ideas on how we could work around these problems?