This looks fantastic, Xorkoth! Just one thing springs to my mind at the moment: there's a distinct underrepresentation of auditory effects in the current version. Of course, vision is dominant in most humans and (perhaps, via various causal pathways, because of this) in most psychedelic experience; but I do feel that audition needs a slightly larger part in this survey. At the moment, as far as I can see, there are just 2 (or 3, if you count the synaesthesia one) questions on audition, namely:
"Auditive augmentation (The ability to hear more clearly/sharply)"
"Increase in ability to sense the direction of sounds"
"Synaesthesia (the blending of senses, ie, hearing colors, seeing sounds)"
It would, thus, not cover the primary sensory effects of DiPT, for instance (auditory distortion; specifically, key-change, deepening, altered consonance/dissonance, etc), nor would it cover the auditory hallucinations experienced on both DiPT and other substances (certainly LSD and 2C-C have not been without auditory hallucinations for me) which could have a single item to themselves or could, like the closed-eye visuals, have several items for their various possible forms, e.g. pure rhythm, short bleeps, sustained series of tones, harmonized tones, etc).
To be fair, audition may be overrepresented in my mind; but maybe somewhere between how much is in the survey now, and my ideal?
Oh, I suppose one might say that synaesthesia is underrepresented, with only one question. How about asking people to specify the type; or, perhaps better, have a separate question for each known variant of synaesthesia (e.g. grapheme-colour synaesthesia, sound-vision synaesthesia etc).
Anyway, jolly good work! With a decent sample-size, this could produce fascinating results, both for the purposes of just mapping out psychedelia-space and also potentially for mapping the relationships between chemical structure and psychedelia-space. I very much look forward to seeing the results of this research.
ETA: Oh, and I echo uniter's suggestion of set and setting covariates. Although a sufficient sample size will probably average out some effects of set and setting, it won't average out those variations in set and setting that are correlated with the drug taken (e.g. expectations from the drug, preferred uses of it), so having set and setting as measured covariates should allow you to control for them statistically in any analyses.
ETA: Sorry, another idea! A more standard approach in psychological questionnaires is to have neutral questions, with a scale ranging from extreme disagreement to extreme agreement; rather than, as here, ranging from slight agreement to extreme agreement (with one option for no agreement), which could be taken as rather leading. One could, for instance, have 'Did you experience changes in the clarity of your speech? Much less clear... less clear... neither more nor less clear ... more clear .... much more clear'; rather than 'Slurring of speech? Have not experienced... lightly experienced...' etc. It would also allow you to place some items (mood lift, mood drop) within one scale, although you may not want to do that, I suppose, because something may produce both!
Not sure how sensible or needed this idea is, but I thought I'd throw it out while I had it.
ETA: Oh, and I can't see an item on tremors (vibrating/shaking, like the jitters commonly reported on 4-HO-DiPT, but also experienced on others (e.g., for me, 2C-C and DiPT)). Perhaps stimulation should (also?) be broken down into cognitive, peripheral, and motor stimulation?
Also, various other senses are wholly missing (unless I've just missed them). Proprioception (body position sense, reportedly altered on 2C-B, particularly); thermoreception (i.e. perceived heat and coldness, distinct from actual changes in body temperature; I've certainly experienced implausibly hot and cold moments on various psychedelics); vestibular (sense of orientation/gravity) etc.
ETA: A few (actually, many! I hope this is okay, I just wanted to go through the questionnaire systematically and give as much detailed feedback as I could; feel free to ignore!) more random thoughts:
It'd be useful if there could be some way of recording which trip questionnaires come from the same participant (for the purposes of analysis, this would be a great boon, as it would allow one to partial out - to an extent - the effects of individual differences and examine more clearly the effects of drug; it would also, of course, allow one to explore individual differences more explicitly). Of course, one wouldn't want to record anything that would identify the participants, but one could - for instance - have the participant select a response to a 'Are you a returning participant with an ID number?' question, and if they were not, the questionnaire would give them a randomly generated 6 digit number string to use as ID in future.
Q2: How clear is it, for the case of - say - cactus, what information you're after here? Will people say how many milligrams of cactus they took, how many grams of cactus they took, or how many suspected milligrams of mescaline within the cactus they took? Perhaps this could be worded more clearly.
Q7->: I find the imposed division between wanted and unwanted effects curious. Q14's 'Intensified perception of bodily functions' seems by no means obviously unwanted. Wouldn't it be better, rather than telling participants which effects they wanted and which they didn't want, to ask them, for each item, a subsidiary question 'How did you feel about this part of the effects?' 'Would much rather it didn't happen....... neutral .... Am very glad it happened'? Or just to leave that out entirely?
Q7: Minor typo: "Unrelated miscellan
dous hallucinations"
QQ7, 8, 10-15: In these questions, you use the phrase 'this substance', while in Q9 you say 'this experience'. I think, for clarity, all Qs should use Q9's phrasing, to reduce the chance that people will forget/miss the statement 'For the remainder of the survey, please describe only effects that you experienced on this individual trip you are taking the survey about.'
Q8: I'm not really clear what 'Hallucination of witnessing actual bodily functions' means at all... can this be rephrased?
Q8: Also, I wonder if there's anyway of capturing movement more in this section; when I have CEVs (typically not on psychedelics; rather on MDMC and cannabinoids/cannabis), they are sometimes relatively static, but often quite dynamic in all sorts of interesting ways. The patterns may, for instance, zoom in and out, or may rotate; they may shift with one's eyes, or be fixed in a location of real space. In terms of obtaining data that could speak to which parts of the brain drugs are more or less expressed in, it could be really useful to have information on the degree and nature of any movement in visuals, since many of the areas of the visual cortex are specialized for various sorts of motion processing.
Q10: I've certainly found auditory diminution as well as auditory augmentation on occasions; a couple of leading questions in here.
Q11: Okay, a lot of leading questions in here. I guess this style of questioning is similar to symptom questionnaires in medicine; but in that case, one is aiming to err on the side of detection of known symptoms (i.e. make more false positives than misses), whereas I would guess one might be wanting to try to avoid erring systematically on either side of a given question when the space one is mapping out is barely (rigorously) mapped at all yet. So, for instance, it should be as easy for a participant to register a decrease in creative thinking or introspection as an increase.
Q11: Some phrases here might not be meaningful to all participants. One item "Glossolalia (speaking in tongues)" requires knowledge either of psychiatrc or religious terminology; perhaps "Speaking an unknown language" would be clearer? Not sure about "entity contact" either.
Q13: I'd really like more detailed division of increase and decrease of energy. Psychedelics users often speak of having 'a lot of energy', or conversely a substance being 'stoney', but I feel these terms are ill-defined; or at least I don't have a very clear sense of what they refer to: often, for me, a substance both increases and decreases energy in various different ways. So... 'Did heart rate change? 'Much slower .... Much faster'; 'Did involuntary motor activity change?' 'Much less involuntary movement.... Much more'; 'Did your inclination to be physically active change?' 'Much less inclined... much more inclined'; 'Did your mental alertness change?' 'Much less alert... much more alert'.
Q15: You list 'increase in blood pressure'. As far as I'm aware, people are typically unable to judge blood pressure; it's not something one can perceive directly, usually. Various other symptoms that are not directly related to blood pressure get misreported as changes in blood pressure. Of course, if people have a sphygmometer, they can measure it; but I'd guess that most of the responses to this question will be fairly unhelpful guesses. Strange that you require the pulse to be confirmed, when this is (time-distortion aside!) rather more easy to judge than blood pressure.
Q15: Might be worth defining 'brain zaps'. Anyone who's had them will doubtless immediately know what you mean, but anyone who hasn't may be a bit confused.
Thanks again, Xorkoth for taking the time and effort to produce this questionnaire; it'd be fine as it stands - these are all fairly minor quibbles.
ETA: Also, I wonder if it's needed to exclude cases where multiple psychedelics were taken; why not just ask people to note in text box any additional drugs and quantities thereof taken; if there aren't enough combo reports to analyze effectively, discard that data: you lose nothing by collecting it.
to help but have had a shitstorm going on I suppose - if I can I will...
i'm with you!