PLEASE HELP BY PARTICIPATING IN MY RESEARCH ON THE EXPERIENCE OF READING FICTION!
As many of you know, I am a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience. I am beginning to conduct some informal research on the experience of reading fiction. I am collecting responses at Survey Monkey - a site that helps one conduct on-line surveys. If you are visiting my blog I wouldn't be surprised if you were interested in books and reading yourself. It would be so helpful if you would be willing to click the link below and participate! It should take about 6-10 minutes. There is no identifying information collected with these responses - I am collecting no identifying information and have disabled anything that lets one trace email addresses or IP addresses - so your answers are completely anonymous. I hope to share some of the fruits of your labors and my analyses here at my blog, which should be fun for all you book fiends. Finally, no organization or corporation public or private is sponsoring this survey.
I am looking for at least 60 participants, although I wouldn't mind more! So feel free to direct friends and family here to click the link below, or share this url with them:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ErmxuDQnnA2v_2fYZ0rg21JQ_3d_3d
Participants do not have to be avid readers, they can be occasional or even unenthusiastic readers - I would like as broadly representative a sample as I can find.
Click Here to take survey
Thank you!
17 comments:
Hi.
In order to take a representative sample, you should first define the population and then randomly draw a subset from it. If this is not feasible, unless you get a huge number of survey completed, you are not allowed to make inference from your results. What kind of analyses are you thinking to apply?
I really dislike the idea of taking an online survey but for you I will.
This is very informal, May, I'm not publishing the results in a journal. Just looking at trends in an informal way in a convenience sample. I'm using some of the experience for a class I'm taking on understanding measuring scales.
I appreciate your participating! It will be very helpful.
May - I should add, I will be most upfront about the reported demographics of the sample I do end up with when I post any analyses. While it is in no way a random sample, I do hope that the reach of the web will, in some ways, make this convenience sample more broadly representative than the subjects usually recruited on single college campuses who's results are then published in journals and generalized to all people. I do realize that a 14 year old boy could respond as a 60 year old woman, but, that's just a chance worth taking given the goals of this survey. With no reward and a time comittment, I'm hoping trouble makers won't be interested enough to bother.
I see.
What you could do, once you have the surveys completed, is to check the representativeness of the sample for a couple of demographic variables. In case it wasn't, you could use weights in order to reduce the bias.
I hope that you will get a higher number of completed surveys than expected.
All done! I'll post about it tomorrow and am eager to read what you have to say about the results. I hope it all goes well for you.
I took it!!
I completed your survey and found it to be fascinating. I would be interested to find out if there are actually any people who consider themselves readers who aren't (at least momentarily) completely transported by the book they are reading. And if they aren't why they read in the first place.
I'll include a link to you in my blog post tomorrow.
May - Thanks! and thank you for that idea. I hoped to use some of the demographic info to try to balance or at least inform me about how biased a sample I did seem to be getting - i.e. is everyone in a book club or american or 21-25, etc...
Imani, Sheila, Kookie -
Thank you!!! The best link to post is one to my blog and then they can click the link to the survey. For some reason, the url is unreliable.
Sounds fun - count me in! Clicking my way over right .... now...
Verbivore - Thanks for doing it!
I just took it. A very interesting survey!
Thank you, Emily!!
I will take it right now and advertise it in my blog later today. Unless I forget. But you can remind me if that happens, right?
Thanks, Dewey! What did we do before the internet?
Since you want more men, if my son and husband take it from my same IP address, will that mess things up?
I went ahead and took the survey. I also added a link in my blog. I wish you luck with your research.
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