Please Participate!

[Necronopticous]

Hey guys, one of my classes this semester is in Sociology. Our Term paper and final project in the class is going to be a research paper based on a sociological study of our choice. I've decided on my research question and am going to use surveys to collect my data. When I asked my professor about the idea he said it was just fine except that usually when people do surveys via message board or E-Mail they find it very hard to get people to participate.

The survey would consist only of about 10-15 multiple choice questions and shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to complete. An example of a question on the survey would be something to the effect of:

On average, I play video games about ____ hours a week.

A. Less than 10
B. 10 to 20
C. 20 to 30
D. More than 30

Would you all be willing to participate? Of course, at the end of the semester I'll post the full text of the research paper for everyone to read. Please let me know, thanks alot.

[Zifnab]

Yeah, I'm game.

[Necronopticous]

Oh I should probably add that the survey will require your Age and Gender, I should include that before I ask people if they'll do the survey or not.

[Cz]

Provided the survery weren't to ask anything too personal (which from the looks of things won't be the case) then I'd be perfectly happy to help.

[Yamaneko]

I'll do it.

[Denmark]

I'm in. I LIKE SURVEYS :DDDDDDD

[Az Lionheart]

i will do it if you want.........

[Triple T]

Sure, I'll be one of your guinea pigs.

[fire_of_avalon]

I'm in. I LIKE SURVEYS DDDDDD

[Sacred Phoenix]

I'll do it. I love surveys too.

[-N-]

I don't know if you only want to sample us. We're not a pure random sample of the population, we're somewhat stratified in that we've been separated out because we have something to do with video games in some way or another. You may want to do a pure simple random sample of EVERYONE you know and include us as people you know, so that some of us get included in your results, but your results are not solely from us.

In addition (although you can't reasonably control this), you're allowing the sample to choose itself in that we decide whether or not we want to take the survey. This can also introduce some bias, but compared to the above issue, it's not nearly as noticeable.

Anyways, just post the survey here when it's done and have people PM you their answers. Of course, that removes anonymity, which may affect you as a data collector. See if there's some way to send anon PMs. Arche?

[Cz]

I believe that proper etiquette in these situations is to lie about your sampling method.

[Necronopticous]

I don't know if you only want to sample us. We're not a pure random sample of the population, we're somewhat stratified in that we've been separated out because we have something to do with video games in some way or another. You may want to do a pure simple random sample of EVERYONE you know and include us as people you know, so that some of us get included in your results, but your results are not solely from us.

In addition (although you can't reasonably control this), you're allowing the sample to choose itself in that we decide whether or not we want to take the survey. This can also introduce some bias, but compared to the above issue, it's not nearly as noticeable.

Anyways, just post the survey here when it's done and have people PM you their answers. Of course, that removes anonymity, which may affect you as a data collector. See if there's some way to send anon PMs. Arche?

You aren't the only ones doing the survey. The sample will come from three major sources, this is one of them. It's not going to be a random representative survey of any real population, mainly because I don't have the time or resources for that. It's not even really expected, basically this is just an assignment showing the professor that we understand how to analyze data from a sociological study and write about it. It's actually pretty broad, thanks for pointing this stuff out though.

One of the things I'm doing to minimize bias is not releasing the actual research question to those doing the survey, at least until all the results are in. But yes, we'll just have to hope everyone's honest since it's not going to be anonymous either.

[Chaos]

Yeah, sure, I'm game.
I leik teh surveyh.

Chaos

[SirWilliam]

I see no reason my not, I am taking Soc 101 right now too.