Surveys, Polls, & Academic Research

Comments on survey design

/ Elizabeth / 10 Comments

Because this survey (on “sexual and asexual relationship dynamics” from Ball State University) did not have any option to leave comments on the design of the survey and what the questions were supposed to mean at the end, I’m going to just leave my comments here. I started copying and pasting questions into Notepad somewhere in the middle of the survey, so these are only some of the issues I had with this survey. I surely have forgotten others. At the end, I will mention the way the survey handled consent, but I’m mostly not focusing on that.

I want to preface this by saying that I am really annoyed by MOST surveys, I just don’t typically have the time to comment on them like this, and when there is an option to share comments about the survey within the survey itself, there is usually no need to share those comments publicly. This survey is not even remotely exceptional or surprising. More discussion of asexuals’ responses to academic surveys can be found in a fairly recent Asexual Agenda question of the week. I hope that people who research asexuality consider these problems when designing surveys in the future. Honestly, these are mostly problems that testing with a focus group could have helped iron out. It is very frustrating that these issues don’t ever seem to be corrected before the surveys are sent out.

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Gray is the New White

/ Elizabeth / 14 Comments

As you can see, things look a little different around here. I finally got off my ass (only figuratively speaking, of course) and applied my knowledge of CSS to design a new layout for the blog. Since I tend to be verbose, I thought it would be better with a larger area for text. This also fixes the problem of how the comment threads were being displayed.

I realize the text may be a bit too small for some readers, but if this is a problem for you, you can adjust the text size from your browser, under the View menu.

Also: I am a font junky, so I like to collect tons of different fonts. Naturally, I made the layout with a specific font in mind, Baar Sophia, which you can download from here. To install: download, unzip if necessary, and put it in your fonts directory. You don’t have to have it, but I personally think it looks nicer this way. :)

I don’t have anything interesting to say right now, so how about a poll?

(Please note: I’m not saying that atheism is a religion, that would be silly. But if you’re going to have a poll about religion, you have to also include options for the non-religious!)