A colleague of mine, Dr. Keely Kolmes, is conducting a survey about what you — as a consumer — would be interested in looking for in an online therapist review website.
Why is she …
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Dr. Grohol, I’m such a fan of PC. And I think this survey might prove be very useful. However, I wonder whether your introduction to readers, saying that ratings websites do a “horrible” job,and that it’s “impossible” to draw conclusions from online reviews, isn’t a bit of “push” polling that will prejudice the results.
BTW, did you see the interesting NYT piece by Ron Lieber within the last couple of days about medical rating services? Here’s the link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/your-money/why-the-web-lacks-authoritative-reviews-of-doctors.html?scp=2&sq=doctor%20ratings&st=cse&gwh=F157914A8921DC6093D1CFED460FA5D9
I’ve written about this issue previously:
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2011/03/20/yelp-and-therapist-reviews/
and that review sites, unless they have at least a dozen+ reviews, are completely and utterly unreliable:
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/reliability-and-validity-in-a-web-20-world/
So yeah, I stand by those previous articles. A site like Yelp does a completely horrible job in getting to variables that are of benefit to other consumers looking to see that doctor or therapist. Yelp’s representative at SXSW said something to the effect, “Well, you can just read through the reviews to get a sense of whether the doc is any good.”
Umm, okay. But this doesn’t address too little or too much data — two very real problems on most review websites. Too little means whatever you’re reading has no reliability. Too much means you’re wasting your valuable time reading long narratives that have little objective data (and honestly, if a professional or restaurant on Yelp has 200 reviews, who’s reading all of them? Nobody.)
The NY Times article suggests it’s a problem of too many people living in small towns (which while I think is a small part of the problem, is in no way the core of the problem). I’ll probably write a reaction to this article later on when I’ve had more time to digest it.
Dr. Grohol, your position on Yelp reviews, etc. is exceptionally well argued in the articles to whcih you link. All I’m saying is that when one is soliciting responses to what should be an unbiased poll, it’s probably better not to state one’s own strong opinion on the matter to those whom one is seeking to take the poll. It can be prejudicial, I think.
I hope Dr. Kolmes discusses her findings here when she’s got enough data.