Received a letter and follow-up phone call from an organization called Knowledge Network. They don't sell anything and do not share your info with anyone, but claim they pay for opinions relating to research. I am always leery of these things. Anyone heard of them?

Yes. I've been doing surveys for Knowledge Networks (originally InterSurvey) for, oh, I think 3 years or so. Originally the setup was they gave participants a WebTV box with free service. Without it, some of their survey members wouldn't be able to do the surveys. Finally they switched it so that if you already had access, you could do surveys on your own computer and earn points instead. Much better! Now you can get cash. I just got another $25 check from them last week. They give varying numbers of points per survey, minimum of a few thousand. Every 25,000 you can request a check for $25. I've gotten $75 or $100 from them since switching from the original WebTV-based setup. That's probably, oh, a little over a year's worth. So maybe you could earn $75-100 per year with these. Surveys haven't been coming more than about once every couple weeks for me, as I recall. Mostly these are to do with products, but I've done a few political surveys and such.

I would say if you are selected, give it a try. You can always quit if you decide it's too much work. You can't volunteer, as they are running this as a scientific random sample sort of thing. But it's definitely legit.

Another outfit that pays for surveys is Pinecone Research. They do mainly product evaluation. (Sometimes your survey can result in a followup of doing an actual product test if you agree to it; they will ship you the product to try out, with another survey after trying it.) It pays $5 per survey, by check in the mail. This one you have to watch for banner ads on the web (Yahoo, etc.) asking for new participants.

Thanks for the info. I will give it a try. I'm so opinionated anyway, I might as well annoy strangers instead of family and friends

For anyone who wants to join go to www.goggle.com
type in pinecone research. Go about half way down the page and you'll find some links to join.

Regards,
Robert

Knowledge Networks is run by two Stanford political scientists, Norman Nie and Douglas Rivers. They give folks computers in return for filling out surveys, which they use for marketing and academic research. Nie is rather famous in another respect--way back in the 1960s, when he was a graduate student at Stanford (before going to Chicago, where he spent most of his illustrious academic career), he and a few other political science grad students invented SPSS, which was the most widely used statistical software in both academics (until they priced themselves out of the market) and business (may still be true).