Dr. Solomons and VPF Director Joanne Yount in the Cleveland airport, returning from the VPF Ohio Seminar, May 2000. At the VPF Maryland Seminar in October 1998, the Foundation began publishing statistics from the registration forms and distributing them to the attendees. The information was compiled at the close of registration, a few days before the Seminar, so that the women could see comprehensively how the significantly improved members in their group had recovered to date. This way of gathering information is not a scientific survey. It's more of an informal poll.
Most surveys have multiple choice responses and uniform, quantifiable answers.
That means the person taking the survey can say anything she wants, in her own words, without any prompting. While this informal way of gathering information is useful, exactitude and specificity are sometimes lacking. Sometimes a registrant would wax rapturous about how she could at long last wear jeans, have intercourse, sit at her desk for hours . . . However, the absence of this word does not indicate they are not in The Pain Project. A scientifically designed survey would elicit this information and reveal whether timing had made a statistically significant difference.