Hey all- I got an email out of the blue a couple weeks ago from a grad student who was conducting some research and wanted to know if I would be willing to help out by posting a link to a survey. I said “Of course,” and then me being me, promptly forgot to post it. She contacted me again, and I said “Oops, please email me on Monday and I will remember.” Soooo, it’s Monday, she emailed me, and I remembered. So if you have a moment or two, please help out and participate.
Political Mobilization: Researchers Seek Participants in Online Study
My name is Raynee Gutting and I am conducting an online survey about people’s personal characteristics and beliefs, and how people become politically active and engaged. The study is brief and interesting, and should help me understand how individuals think about important political issues and American society more generally. In our current political climate, I think developing an understanding of how people interact with the political environment is critical for America to thrive. I hope you will take a few minutes to participate!
The survey can be accessed by using the following link. We ask you to please do not discuss your participation in the study for the next few weeks (please do not post comments), as to not influence other participants! As a thank you for your participation, you will have the opportunity to enter into a lottery to win one of four $25 Amazon gift cards.
Follow this link to the Survey:
https://stonybrookuniversity.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_6WEo7G83KIXw3xr
I am based at Stony Brook University (http://www.stonybrook.edu/) and this study has been approved by Stony Brook University’s Institutional Review Board protecting research involving human subjects. Questions about participation or results of the study can be directed to Raynee Gutting at [email protected].
If you have ever had to work with an Institutional Review Board (IRB), you will fill out this survey just out of sympathy.
geg6
Done!
raven
Buddhist ain’t a choice!!!!
jl
interesting survey. Quick, didn’t take half an hour.
japa21
Also done. Interesting. Make sure she sends you the results.
Baquist
So true, John. Ever after my first time working with an IRB, those are the magic words to get me to fill in any surveys I encounter, just on sympathy alone.
jl
@raven: You can write it in, which is what I finally decided to do. Not sure whether I am a very liberal transcendentalist type Prot or Buddhist.I decided to go for simpler answer, due to my sympathies to investigator who might have to deal with lots of idiosyncratic weirdo answers for the religion question. Especially if getting responses from places like BJ.
raven
@jl: I don’t care, I want it as a choice!
Redshift
Since we’re not supposed to discuss our participation, I’m going to treat this as an open thread.
Favorite current USA Today headline:
White House Candidates Race to Distance Themselves from White Supremacist
http://usat.ly/1N1guhQ
raven
@Redshift: Supposed to says who?
Woodrowfan
we deserve puppy pics for this!
Phylllis
Done. Open thread you say? Two weeks until vacay at Jekyll Island. Woo hoo.
Ruviana
Done! Anything to help a graduate student!
Gravie
Did it. Easy.
JPL
done
Mike J
@Redshift:
Saw a great tweet on a different hed:
redshirt
Done.
Felt a wingnut getting angry at the survey though. LIBERALS!
gbear
Skewed poll results!!!
JPL
@gbear: I assume that conservative blogs were asked to participate, if not that it is skewed.
Mike J
@Mike J: And in other flag news:
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is expected to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds at a Monday afternoon press conference.
Chris
Cole, as it happens, I just had to fill out an IRB request for me (approved earlier this week). It is indeed a fairly headache-inducing process, and that was just for an exemption, I prefer not to imagine what a pain in the soft parts it must be to do the full thing.
Since I’m not supposed to comment for a few weeks, I can only say that I may or may not be about to complete this survey and may or may not have opinions as to the content thereof. Just… please pass on heartfelt “best of luck,” “hope your project works out” and “hope this helps” to your friend.
shawn
done – nothing like a suvery to remind me that i care way less than i should about stuff
rk
Took the survey. I’d be interested in the results.
Linnaeus
Would discussion of our responses here possibly introduce bias in the survey from subsequent subjects?
jl
@Redshift: Unless you publicly go by the name ‘Redshift’ I think it is OK to say you took it.
jl
@Linnaeus: It would probably introduce bias among those who decide to take the survey after reading the comments. But it is the kind of bias that a survey like this should be taking account of anyway, due to fact that responses are dependent on referral from an initial contact (in this case the BJ blog).
Edit: so, I don’t see a big problem with discussion.
Edit2: getting respondents this way goes under general term ‘snowball sampling’ and and depending on details, the researchers should have determined the appropriate adjustments for the dependence induced by referrals already.
beltane
Done. I love filling out surveys. Unfortunately, this one did not tell me which movie star I was married to in a past life or which world capital I would be best suited to live in.
Katy
@raven: Says the person writing the questionnaire – doesn’t want to bias subsequent replies. However – she REQUIRES an email address from you at the end, purportedly in order to enter the drawing for gift cards – but I could not get past without giving an email addy. So she got one that even if she does use it – improperly – later on, it won’t bother me. If she’d said “to validate that you’re a real person and haven’t taken the Q before”, I might have given it to her.
raven
@Katy: She’s lucky I did it at all.
Anonymous At Work
I do IRB work and I resemble that remark!
That being said, social science/behavior research got caught in the wide net of OHRP regulations and most IRBs tend to be overly strict in their interpretations of the regulations.
gbear
@Mike J:
I read that the legislature has to approve the removal by a 2/3 vote. Wouldn’t it be the sh*ts for Nikki (and the whole state) if they couldn’t get the votes?
JPL
Local CBS news is going to cover the press conference.
Redshift
@jl: I wasn’t referring to people posting that they’d taken the survey, just that the restriction on discussing the contents in detail meant it was probably not going to provide fodder for our usual level of discussion, so we should probably treat this as an open thread even if JC didn’t declare it to be one.
jl
Big to-do today over fact that Obama mentioned or said (he did not use) the N word. Oh.. the humanity!
IIRC my intro philosophy course, there is a lot of confusion over use and mention out there today, especially from what I read on Wonkette and TPM, Fox News.
I didn’t have the stomach to click on any of the videos. Not in the mood to hear white bigots and cynical manipulators concern trolling and outrage manufacturing.
‘THEY’ are taking over because THEY can use the N word and we cannot!’
Well, except for Bob Shieffer I don’t use derogatory terms like ‘hick’ or ‘cracker’ either, and I am tired of this BS from my fellow whities.
Edit: I notice some of the concern trollers describe what Obama did as ‘saying’, rather than using. They may have intro philosophy too, or maybe just have an intuition about it. Don’t seem to realize that undermines their argument though.
JPL
@gbear: Clyburn said they can change the law with another law and a simple majority.
raven
Nikki is on now.
Mike J
@gbear:
Since Boeing set up a line down there to play hardball with the machinists union here in Washington, I think it would be appropriate to ask their PR people about this statement: “I spend a lot of my days on the phone with CEOs, recruiting jobs to this state. I can honestly say I have not had one conversation with a single CEO about the confederate flag.”
LanceThruster
Done. The gift card is *mine*!!
jl
@Redshift: I’m not going to discuss the questions in detail. I guess I assumed that few people would read a discussion of the contents and then change their mind and take the survey.
But, my point was that if that happened it would produce a kind of bias that is inherent in the sampling methodology already, and should already be adjusted for.
So, I didn’t mean to encourage discussion. I just think that it if a few commenters say something, it is not a huge problem.
Elizabelle
Traditions that are noble?
Really, Nikki? And they would be…. (She mentioned 3 quickly…)
raven
@jl: The sample selection criteria was not exactly neutral.
Elizabelle
“We do not need to declare a winner or a loser here.”
Schadenfreude, darling, Schadenfreude ….
raven
See, they are going to take it down and then everyone is going to bitch about HOW they take it down. Just like I said yesterday it ain’t gonna mean shit.
jl
@raven: Hope she does the right thing.
I don’t get it, really. Even if for some people the Confederate battle flag (note they are obsessed with the battle flag, not the stars and bars, which is basis for a lot of Southern state flags) is a heritage thing, I don’t understand the die hard emotional investment.
I always liked the Gadsden flag. Teabaggers hijacked it and wrecked it. Too bad for me.
Elizabelle
Lindsey looks tiny and very white in that crowd. Did not notice him until camera panned out.
jl
@raven:
” The sample selection criteria was not exactly neutral. ”
No worries, we statistikers got formulas for that. I hope they use them.
raven
@jl: No one remembers when the Gadsen Flag was the symbol of “People’s Bi-Centennnial”.
Elizabelle
OT: checked to see what local DC networks were doing.
Another breaking news press conference: recently elected Maryland Governor Larry Hogan (Republican) announcing he has cancer. Lymphoma. All local DC nets covering it.
ETA: And sounds like it’s metastasized. “At least Stage III, if not Stage IV.”
raven
@jl: Yea, my chair was one of you and I was his first qual diss. He was a dork!
Elizabelle
Hogan was elected in 2014; inaugurated this year.
jl
@raven:
” Yea, my chair was one of you and I was his first qual diss. He was a dork! ”
If ‘dork’ is all you remember, I would guess specialty was analysis of variance, or sampling..
CaseyL
Survey done! Looks like an interesting study.
raven
@jl: He could construct a mean survey!
fuckwit
Mike J: That is a thing of beauty.. Yeah, should be obvious. Nobody involved in the “party of Lincoln” should have even the remotest hesitation to shit all over anything to do with the Confederacy.
Thanks, Nixon.
HRA
I finished the survey. I worked at a SUNY U till last year. It was not unusual to see a student coming at you with a clip board and a survey on campus. I wish her success with the survey.
Hob
There’s one part of the survey that made me stop and blink a few times and wonder whether it was on the up and up, because it appears to be asking whether you want to join the mailing list of a specific organization. In the context of the survey, it seems like it’s meant to be a fictional organization, but unfortunately there’s also a real group by the same name. My answer would’ve been the same in either case, so I went ahead with the rest, but I mentioned this to them in the feedback space at the end.
Lymie
I hate badly constructed questionnaires – ones where the premise of the question is based on a falsehood. Never the less I did it. Perhaps I can add to the tails of the distribution or find out how my fellow BJs agree with me.
Another example, not in this survey, is about healthcare- do you like obamacare? My answer is no, but because I want single payer, not because I oppose government healthcare.
karen marie
@raven: My understanding is Haley said it woud be “moved,” not “removed,” or “taken down,” leaving me to believe it will simply be relocated somewhere other than the capitol building, but not removed entirely.
Paul in KY
Took survey. Best wishes to students.