susan06

Hi, my name is Susan and am a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. My team is conducting a study on people's opinions on bicycling and helmets for a class called Innovation Teams. We would love to get your input. The survey will take about 15 minutes or less.

I understand that everyone is busy, so to thank the survey participants, my team is raffling 5 gift certificates of $100 value (from your choice of online store, amazon.com, target.com…etc) to the people who qualify and complete the survey. These will be raffled on November 16th and results emailed out immediately.

The address of the link is https://www.halbonline.com/iteams, please feel free to email i_teams@mit.edu if you have any concerns or questions. Thank you so much for your help!

supercub

I did this. I hope it's not some kind of scheme, but it seems legit.

Lurker1999

Here's a link to i-teams:

https://web.mit.edu/deshpandecenter/i...cts.html#young

Tom Bombadil

It sure asks a lot of questions that would be very valuable for a store/marketing company to know. More than I expected from a college survey.

BikeManDan

Seems legit to me
Filled it out

RoseInOregon

Well, if they're looking to fund their research, they're smart to present survey results to potential donors demonstrating the commercial potential of their project.

HardyWeinberg

It was interesting; while safety is the main issue for my kids, no helmet is safe if they won't wear it, so in that sense 'style' (or a kid's perception of it) and comfort are the be-all-end-all and there were no real questions on that.

Cyclist0383

Who would benefit if it were marketing or R&D? Cyclists perhaps.......

jtgish

I did it and it took 30 seconds, they did not need additional info from me.

jeff-o

I filled it out, too. Hopefully my answers were useful!

SDRider

Done.

Garfield Cat

M.I.T.?? This has got to be data mining.

DogBoy

Sounds like they have a really heavy ugly safe helmet and they are trying to see if they can sell it anyway.

Flimflam

I did this too

painthawg

And they don't seem to care a bit about ventilation. I don't care how safe it is, very few of us will wear bullet proof helmets that fry our brains. Okay so I'm venting mainly because surveys that force answers on me annoy the heck out of me. I get enough of these at work, I didn't expect it from an MIT group. I also would guess that this got blasted to a hundred forums and they won't come read my concerns. After I pick some arbtrary answer forced on me by the system, maybe they'll take me to a comments section.

Select A B or C even if D is your real answer that we failed to supply.

I'm not bitter, just bitter.

caloso

I'm still baffled by the "I always ride with both hands on the handlebars" question. Is there anyone who would answer yes to that question? Anyone who never needs to signal or drink or adjust a zipper?

NeezyDeezy

I answered yes to that question, even though taken literally it doesn't work.

Also, I think the URL and the subject matter are both very suspicious. Why would MIT bother asking these kinds of questions, especially without revealing their purpose....

Cyclist0383

It's all an evil conspiracy to find out what cyclists want.....and then produce that product....the shame!

mister

I did it. I don't see the harm. Maybe a better, more cost effective helmet will be produced. Maybe they'll make a limited edition tin foil model for some folks.

cerewa

I think it's likely they don't want to tell you what they're going to do with the results because they're worried that would bias the results. My psychology-major girlfriend agrees.

Brian Sorrell

A good friend did his PhD in Sociology and he sort of specializes in online surveys and data analysis. This looks much like the surveys I've seen him design, and it seems like a reasonable project for a (grad) student. I checked out iteams and they are partnered with industry, so it's reasonable to think that they're gathering marketing information while learning about online surveying and analysis at the same time. Yep, seems legit to me too. Hell, I don't mind letting people know what I think about helmets anyway. And they could gather roughly the same information from a credit card company too, if they really wanted to.

Allen

Yeah if it is a scam they did their homework. iTeams is also affiliated with M.I.T.
https://web.mit.edu/deshpandecenter/iteams/about.html

closetbiker

I think they're trying to identify "risk takers" but doing a poor job of it.

Worse question, do you wear a seat belt, as if cyclists without helmets are like motorists without seat belts. Sheesh.

edtrek

They asked what other factor I'd like to see in my next helmet, and boy that's a button for me. I want a very-high viz yellow/green helmet that stands out like a beacon. So if you MIT folks are reading this forum, may I say (1) nice survey and (2)go hi-viz, and maybe avoid a car/bike collision.

Just my .02. I'm a viz freak (yes, I do have an orange triangle on all my bikes).