How To Help Your Teen Get Enough EPQ Survey Responses (No Expert Knowledge Needed)
Last Tuesday, I was scraping burnt lasagna crumbs off our kitchen table, our cocker spaniel was sneaking crumbs off the floor, and my 17-year-old Sam was slouched in his chair pushing garlic bread around his plate instead of eating. He’d been quiet for 10 minutes, which is unusual for him, so I asked what was going on. He mumbled that he needed 100 completed survey responses for his EPQ, it’s due in 10 days, and he only has 18.
I’d heard the term EPQ enough to know it’s that extended project his sixth form requires for extra UCAS points, but I had no clue what his specific project entailed until that night. He’s looking at whether self-reported screen time before bed correlates with self-reported sleep quality, he said, and all he needs is people to answer 10 quick multiple choice questions. No prior knowledge of the topic needed, no long written answers, just 2 minutes of someone’s time. He’d posted his link to his Instagram story, and all 22 of his friends that saw it replied, but four never filled it out, so that’s 18.
I offered to post the link to the groups I’m in. Sam immediately shook his head. It’s weird asking random people you know to do stuff for me, he said. And won’t it be bad that all the extra responses are from adults, not teens? My teacher said we need a good sample. That’s the part that stuck with me, because I’ve heard that same worry from three other parents at the school gate in the last two months. Every teen doing an EPQ or a big coursework project needs survey responses these days, and no one tells parents or even the kids what “good enough” actually looks like.
I sat down next to him and pulled up my phone. First, I said, let’s write the request together. We didn’t draft a long formal message – I’ve learned people ignore those. I wrote for my local parent WhatsApp group: “My son Sam is doing a 10-question anonymous survey for his sixth form EPQ on screen time and sleep. It takes less than 2 minutes, no prior knowledge needed, and every response helps him out. Link here. Thank you so much!” I added a silly meme of a teen face-down asleep with an iPhone glued to their hand to keep it casual. Then I posted the same message to my work team chat, my monthly book club group, and our extended family WhatsApp.
I told Sam to stop worrying about the adult respondents. If his teacher wants a good sample, what he’s really teaching you is to acknowledge when your sample isn’t perfect, right? I said. You can just write in your methodology that most of your responses come from my adult social and professional network, so your results are biased towards an older age group, and that’s a limitation of your study. That’s not a bad thing – that shows you understand how research works, which is what examiners actually care about.
He shrugged and agreed to try it, and we went off to watch an episode of whatever show he’s into that week. By the time I checked my phone the next morning, he had 72 new responses. One mom in the parent group shared it to her daughter’s university group chat, which got us another 15 teen responses. A cousin of mine shared it to her office Facebook group, and by the end of the week, we hit 112 responses – more than he needed.
Sam sat down to analyze the data a few days later, and while most results lined up with his hypothesis (more screen time before bed = more tired mornings), there were enough outliers that he had something to talk about in his evaluation. When he got his grade back a few months later, he got an A, and the examiner’s feedback specifically called out his honest discussion of sample bias as one of the strongest parts of the project.
I ran into another mom at the supermarket a couple of weeks ago, who was panicking because her daughter needed 80 survey responses for her EPQ on sustainable fashion consumption and only had 20. She told me she was looking into paying for online survey responses, because she didn’t know who else to ask. I told her what we did, and she tried it that night. She texted me three days later saying she had 95 responses, no payment needed.
The thing that surprises me most is how many people stress over this step, when it’s actually one of the easiest parts of the whole project. You don’t need to be a research expert, you don’t need a huge network of strangers, and you don’t need to pay for anything. Most people are happy to spare two minutes to help a student out, as long as you’re clear that it’s quick and no special knowledge is required.
If you’re in this spot right now, the concrete steps that worked for us are simple: Keep your request short, state upfront how long it takes and that no topic knowledge is needed, post it to 3-4 small groups you’re already part of, and encourage your teen to note any sample bias in their write-up. That’s it.
Last night, Sam got an email saying someone new filled out his survey, a month after he submitted it. He laughed and showed me, and said it’s wild that random people are still clicking the link. We don’t know if that A will end up getting him into his first choice university, and there’s a hundred things he’d do differently if he started the project over now. But it turned out the most stressful part of the whole process was just asking for a little help, and that’s something anyone can do.
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