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You will be given a user name (a number) and a password (a combination of letters and numbers, mine is anyway). You need to log into the study each time with your password and user ID as the email link will not take you directly to the survey. It's a pain, but a minor one as the login data are provided in each invitation email so all that's required is a bit of copy and paste.

Pinecone surveys generally work very well, though unfortunately they don't work in Opera which is my browser of choice - a screen appears telling me sternly to complete the project in IE, which I grudgingly do.

The Pinecone website provides all the usual stuff: an extensive and informative FAQ, a chatty newsletter whose aim is clearly to make the members feel valued and attached to the company (the thing that makes me most valued as a respondent is offering reasonable compensation and not asking inanely boring questions, and Pinecone does well on both scores) . I never read them, but for your benefit, I checked the last one: it was about squirrels, acupuncture and teenage drivers, amongst other things.

When contacting Pinecone by phone or email answers are sensible and prompt. Updating your address and profile data is easy and the website works well. All in all, it's a professional company and it acts like a professional company: treats its panel members well, pays excellent rates and provides reasonably steady level of survey (product and idea testing) work. For anybody with any responsibility for household shopping who is considering online surveys I couldn't recommend a better company. Keep your eyes open for that banner!

== Research Buyers ==

This section is intended to provide a short overview for 'the other side' - a possible research buyer, who might be interested in using Pinecone services. It's not relevant at all (unless out of pure interest) to potential respondents.

There are two main problems with Internet surveys from the point of view of users of the research.

One is that members of online panels are nowhere near a random selection of population, even the population of Internet surfers. They are, by default, active volunteers who purposefully came to the site to register (bad: volunteers means not random and thus likely to differ from a representative sample). They are, more often then not, semi-professional respondents and thus even less representative of whatever the population they are supposed to represent.

Pinecone's system of recruiting through a banner placed in

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