Data collection

The data collection lasted 10 days, from 13th October till the 23rd (2008).
A prominent support came from antivirus.about.com (a NYT subsidiary). Mary Landesman, the admin of the website, helped my enormously promoting my survey through the web. She wrote a post in the main page of the website introducing my research and inviting people to join the survey. She posted the link also into her blog, forum, in the weekly newsletters and she asked other websites of the industry to host my questionnaire. In terms of numbers that contribution turned in approximately 550 responses. Likewise I collected approximately 300 responses by personal means; 857 questionnaires were totally gathered; 189 completed the questionnaire by means of the paper version while 668 individuals completed the survey online.
At the beginning of the summer 2008 I created a blog: antivirusvendors.blogspot.com; In the central period of the data collection I wrote several posts and I promoted the blog through the web. The achievement of the 7th position in the ranking of “TopOfBlogs” gave me visibility, traffic and data.
To collect other relevant opinions I asked the support to 3 banks of my city (Banca delle Marche, Unicredit Banca, CARISAP, all located in Civitanova Marche) 2 accounting studios and other small offices.
Other data were collected at the university, at the library, through Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live Messenger and Skype.
The vast amount of responses brought by industry blog surfers generated a sharp discrepancy between the quantity of expert and non expert responses. To fill up the gap and to reach the final 40% of non experts and 60% of experts I went to 2 high schools, other 88 responses were supplied from eighteens.