The era of the long and drawn out survey is drawing to an end. in the digital age, we can no longer afford to waste time asking irrelevant questions. attention spans are short and new research methodologies such as mobile simply cannot support long question- naires. to succeed in today’s research environment, a clear focus is required. this presentation examines a variety of classical survey measures to establish which measures link to reality and which do not. the time has come to sift through all of the “standard” measures and spring clean: what is worth keeping and what should have been thrown away a long time ago?