the response to it is totally voluntary.
Why is that important?
Because the only people that respond to voluntary polls are people who either have an axe to grind (failures), are completely smitten with their purchase decision (Harley and BMW riders with no axe to grind), or have no other things of interest to consume their lives (the paltry number of UJM respondents). The vast majority of people who are merely satisfied and have otherwise full lives will not respond and their non-votes go completely uncounted.
A more equitable methodology would be to count the non-responders as "passively satisfied" in the statistics. I think the numbers would change greatly.
1st off,+1 Fred. 2ndly, let me say I'm no statistician. The only reason i can spell it is with spell check.
I'm always interested in who answers a particular poll, as well as, their motivation because who and why answer skews results.
I just helped complete a survey of 3000 households in my area for our community association and we learned a lot about who answered and why, and although that population and the one in the bike survey are different, I do think there are probably a lot of similarities, especially in age.
We found that younger people were not as inclined to take time with a survey as much as older folks, even though they were asked to participate. The largest group of people that responded were 45-65. It dropped off on both sides of that age as you might expect.
In the bike survey I would expect to find the majority in the same 45-65 age group, similar to the demographics of this forum. On the forum you have the same age bracket, with an engaged group eager to participate in something they are very interested in. You get a lot of people willing to chime in when they have high interest, like this forum.
Now pardon me while i make some gross generalizations and stereotypes:
When your $25k BMW blows a gasket (or final drive), and it costs a couple $K to fix, and the company won't stand behind the over priced product it can really piss you off. Someone asks you how you feel about that, what you gonna say?
https://www.fjrforum.com/forum//public/style_emoticons/default/****.gif
On the other hand if your Hardley Ableson breaks down and you spend a grand having it fixed, that's nothing, because you were going to spend $2500 on chrome dingles and googah anyway, and you may feel that's the price of admission. When you're done you show all your friends the new dingles you paid sooo much for with pride cause that's what you do when you have a Hardley. And when the Wife asks why did you spend so much on the bike last month you can say "it HAD to be fixed", and "its a Harley", so your alibi is plausible.
Suzuki wasn't represented because many of those owners were out practicing their stunting and getting passengers unstuck from in between the tail and rear wheel.
Yamaha folks like us figure shit out and fix it ourselves
. I mean who does tech days better than us? Dealer, we don't need no stinking dealer.
When someone asks you how you feel about that, you say "my bikes great, love it, no problems", reinforcing our superior choice of bike and saying, in other words, everyone else' bikes suck.
I don't know about you but I have had more trouble free miles on my Yamaha's than on any other bikes.
I have always wrenched on my own toys, not just because I am a cheapskate, but because I'm lazy and don't want to waste time fixing what i should be riding. I have had other bikes and lusted for others but changed my mind when I found out they were, shall we say, more demanding of my time.
Lastly, I think MCN surveys on bike repairs and reliability would be more valid than CR. Might have higher response rates and cover more models, but i bet the demographics would be similar.
