Though I guess I suspect that, if the reason a person finds my original research not so useful is just because they aren’t the target audience, they’d be more likely to either not explicitly comment on it or to say something about it not seeming relevant to them. (Rather than making a generic comment about it not seeming useful.)
But I guess this seems less likely in cases where:
the person doesn’t realise that the key reason it wasn’t useful is that they weren’t the target audience, or
the person feels that what they’re focused on is substantially more important than anything else (because then they’ll perceive “useful to them” as meaning a very similar thing to “useful”)
In any case, I’m definitely just taking this survey as providing weak (though useful) evidence, and combining it with various other sources of evidence.
Good point.
Though I guess I suspect that, if the reason a person finds my original research not so useful is just because they aren’t the target audience, they’d be more likely to either not explicitly comment on it or to say something about it not seeming relevant to them. (Rather than making a generic comment about it not seeming useful.)
But I guess this seems less likely in cases where:
the person doesn’t realise that the key reason it wasn’t useful is that they weren’t the target audience, or
the person feels that what they’re focused on is substantially more important than anything else (because then they’ll perceive “useful to them” as meaning a very similar thing to “useful”)
In any case, I’m definitely just taking this survey as providing weak (though useful) evidence, and combining it with various other sources of evidence.
Seems reasonable