SURVEY RESULTS: COLLECTING PREFERENCES

Do you prefer Beauty or are you more satisfied with A Good Bargain? When it comes to collecting what do you prefer?

On the occasion of this blog's 10th anniversary, I launched in May 2020 an online poll about five collecting motives :

1. Scarcity
2. Beauty
3. A Good Bargain
4. Collection Completeness
5. and Historical Significance.

I believed that the poll questions asked were relevant for banknote, coin, and stamp collectors as well. Thus, I promoted my poll also through the International Bond and Share Society (IBSS) and on a number of numismatic online audiences as well, such as CoinsWeekly, Numismatic Bibliomania Society's E-Sylum newsletter, a IBNS discussion group, and several scripophily Facebook groups.

It took a few months, but all together 123 people cast their votes. In addition to questions on collecting motives, I started the poll with some general questions to have a better idea of the participants.

Though poll participation was anonymous, I asked about the participant's country. People responded from at least 20 countries. Top 3 locations were USA, 29%, Germany, 16% and UK, 11%. See the Poll Participants table for the details.

Now what about the collecting motives? Which one is the absolute winner? Do we have the same results for the top 3 locations? Are there any differences between our "starters" and "the experienced" ? Let's find out.

I used the following method to derive a ranking. For each one of the participants I counted how many times a motive was chosen in the participant's comparisons. For example, if someone choose Beauty over Scarcity, then Beauty deserved one point, Scarcity zero. This led to 2460 scores : 123 participants * 10 pair comparisons * 2 motives.

And the winner is...

1. Collection Completeness, 332 points
2. Historical Significance, 323 pts
3. Scarcity, 260 pts
4. Beauty, 159 pts
5. A Good Bargain, 156 pts

The overall winner in the contest is Collection Completeness, closely followed by Historical Significance.

But the numbers also revealed that there are two nuances.

1. The group of the American respondents, 36 of them, however preferred Historical Significance above Collection Completeness.
2. When we analyze the results by the number of years a person is collecting, only one motive prevailed. All 15 participants collecting less than 5 years - our "starters" - strongly preferred Historical Significance above all the other preferences.

Who are the tailenders ?

This might be a surprise but Beauty and A Good Bargain are apparently less important than the other ones when it comes to collecting motives. Even more, this finding applies to both our starters and the experienced.

My sincere thanks to all who participated and spread the word. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

Happy New Year !

To read the complete article, see:
Poll results - Collecting motives (http://leeuwerck.blogspot.com/2020/12/poll-results-collecting-motives.html)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
SURVEY: COLLECTING PREFERENCES (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n20a22.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web