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Drugs and Spirituality Poll Series

Okay, looks like this is a bit harder than I thought. Here's a basic outline:

Spiritual views
  • Which of these best fits your current spiritual outlook?
    • I consider myself a member of an organised religion (single choice)
    • I agree with at least some of the tenets of one or more organised religions (multiple choice)
    • I am on a private spiritual journey
    • I do not consider myself at all spiritual
    • I have not given it any thought
  • Have you ever changed your spiritual views? - If yes, follow with:
    • How recently? (if more than once, use the most recent)
    • What was your spiritual outlook before this change? (repeat previous section)
    • What prompted this change?
      • OK, how do I write this question? Seriously...
      • One option clearly needs to be "it was revealed to me during a drug experience" -> "which" :)

I've gone ahead and made the assumption that nobody "belongs" to more than one religion :). I'm thinking of simply pulling the list for choices from Wikipedia's Major religious groups entry, which should give us at least a decent selection of "default" choices (obviously, an "other" box will be necessary). Ultimately it depends on how finely-grained we want the information.

Need input! Iiiiiiinnnnnnnnn-put! I'm doing all the work here :P
 
Sorry RawEvil, been a bit busy these last couple days.

As for your first solid bullet, I like it a lot! If I can just suggest some minor wording changes:

Which of these best fits your spiritual outlook?
1. I identify with an organized religion and believe in most all of its core tenets.
2. I identify with an organized religion and believe in some, but not all, of its core tenets.
3. I am a spiritual person, but do not identify with any organized religion.
4. I am not a spiritual person.
5. I'm not sure.​

If you do decide to include a list of choices for organized religions that matches up with the old P&S poll, be sure to remove atheism and agnosticism, of course, which are not organized religions :)

I'm not really in favor of asking 'What prompted this change?' or any other open-ended, fill in the blanks questions, because then rifling through and categorizing the responses will complicate the project in countless ways. I say just make your second solid bullet into a multi-part multiple choice question:

Have your spiritual views ever undergone a major change? (Y/N)
If yes:
What was your former spiritual outlook? (Same 5 choices as above)
Do you feel that any of your experiences with drugs played a major role in this change? (Y/N)​

After all, this simpler design does essentially get to the heart of why we're doing the poll -- to see if drug use and spirituality correlate, and to see if drug use might have had a causal effect on people's spiritual views.

You'll have to forgive my analness about all this. I'm currently taking Population Health in med school, which is a truncated statistics course, and I'm getting beaten over the head with study methodology design, causal relationship demonstration, confounding factors, and other such lofty concepts that get brought up pointedly during any scientific paper's peer review. In particular, I'm on the lookout for questions that are too loaded or leading, by their design.

Still, I must say, I'm impressed so far, dude.
 
I've actually just noticed this thread. I'll have to read it all carefully but I'll chime in with some input for starters:

It is definitely possible to operationalize "Religion" and "Spirituality" (as separate measures), so long as their definition is as clear and as bias-free as possible. It's been a while since I was forced to take stats & research for sociology, but I can definitely remember going by studies that used these two variables.

Basically, the only problem with this is that, since these two definitions are ultimately arbitrary (but very accepted nontheless, at least in Sociology), the scope of your research will be very dependent on your choice of definition. You will just have to accept that you'll lose a lot of data due to this, but this is a sacrifice that must be made.

I would also add that, IMO, keeping it simple (A/B/null) is better than making several "degrees" of spirituality, as this will severely muddle your research.

I'll try to dig up something now that I have library access back (I THINK... lol).
 
Don't either of you think for a moment that your criticism isn't welcome! I know little about statistics, having not studied it at all past high school mathematics. I also know that I will probably subconsciously load some of the questions based on my own experience (as we all do), so thanks for picking that up, MDAO.

And that "what prompted this" question was simply scope-creep caused by my tired state last night :)
 
After re-reading the survey questions a few times, I think we've more or less got it. Here's the full survey as it stands:

Demographic
  • Age
  • Gender

Spiritual views
  • Which of these best fits your current spiritual outlook?
    • I identify with an organized religion and believe in most all of its core tenets.
    • I identify with an organized religion and believe in some, but not all, of its core tenets.
    • I am a spiritual person, but do not identify with any organized religion.
    • I am not a spiritual person.
    • I'm not sure.
  • Have your spiritual views ever undergone a major change? - If yes, follow with:
    • (Same 5 choices as above) What was your former spiritual outlook?
    • (Y/N) Do you feel that any of your experiences with drugs played a major role in this change?

General drug use
  • Which drugs have you taken? (can filter later questions based on this answer)

Per-drug:
  • At what age did you first use <drug>?
  • (1-5) How well, on average, do you enjoy the effects of <drug>? 1 = entirely unpleasant, 5 = entirely pleasant
  • (0-5) How, if at all, has <drug> affected your insight or offered spiritual gain? 0 = not at all, 1 = always negatively, 5 = always positively
  • (0-5) How has your use of <drug> affected your life, in general? 0 = not at all, 1 = always negatively, 5 = always positively
  • (Y/N) Do you plan to take <drug> again in the future?
  • For what purpose do you take <drug>?
    1. Strictly for spiritual use - I would never take <drug> for pure recreational purposes
    2. I have only ever used <drug> spiritually, but am open to recreational use
    3. Both spiritually and recreationally, usually spiritually
    4. Both spiritually and recreationally, with no great favour towards either use
    5. Both spiritually and recreationally, usually recreationally
    6. I have only ever used <drug> recreationally, but am open to spiritual use
    7. Strictly for recreational use - I would never take <drug> for pure spiritual purposes

Question: For the "which drugs have you taken" question, should I use the drug listing you posted at the start of this thread, or go into more detail? No answer means I'm using the listing from the original post. :)

Other than that, if nobody can name any outstanding problems with this structure in the next few days or so, then I'm going to start entering it into Limesurvey. Mmmmm, tedious data entry...
 
^ I can see you've done a lot of thinking about this.

But I have a question for you :).

What are you hoping to find out with all of this?

I know it sounds silly asking this. If you're only doing this out of curiosity, then go right ahead.

But if you're trying to test a hypothesis of sorts, then I think there are way too many choices in your poll. Like I said in the previous post, I believe it is best to limit the religion/spirituality choice to just 3.

A golden rule in survey design is to use the minimum number of mutually-exclusive choices, so as to limit the noise:signal ratio.

It is my opinion that, if you want to make this useful for data-gathering, it is best to limit the choices to religious/spiritual/neither while giving a brief but comprehensive definition of both at the beginning.

But again, if you're only doing this for fun, then just forget everything I said :).

Your call guys, just giving some input here.
 
My aim was purely curiosity, but I still see this as MDAO's project, so I'm happy to defer to his judgement at any point. I simply saw the limitations of the vBulletin polling system and figured I could help :)
 
Alright, this is starting to look good. I've built the basic structure in LimeSurvey (it didn't take nearly as long as I expected; those guys did a good job of the UI - for a web app at least). The fourth section is a template which I will need to either work out how to repeat as part of the survey structure, or copy and paste a few times and tediously ensure each option is filled in properly :)

Here's the survey as it stands now. It's not marked as "active", because once that happens you're not allowed to modify the structure - apparently. Something to do with how it handles the database backend. Anyhow, there it is.

Feedback! I needs it! If I've worded something badly or made a blaring omission, please do report it!
 
Very nice, Raw Evil! Just a couple things:

1) Change 'I'm not sure.' to 'I wasn't sure.' in the poll for former spiritual viewpoint.

2) I like your last page a lot, but one for each drug tried? I hope that doesn't get tiresome to the people who've done a little bit of everything.

Other than that, I'd say it's ready to roll. I and I, captain.
 
1: Done

2: Inspiration: there is an "array" question type, which can apparently plot a question against a number of answer inputs. This should compact the question a little.
2A: Apathy has defeated me tonight; I'll finish it on the weekend.
 
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Argh, defeated.... While it is possible to create "array" type questions, it is not possible to filter individual elements of these arrays. What this means is we're left with two options:

1: As per the original plan, repeat the last page for each drug tried, which as you stated, could get tiresome for what is likely to be a nontrivial fraction of Bluelighters; or
2: Show the last page as array questions, and somehow conditionally enforce a validation rule which ensures the user chooses "I have not tried this drug" for a particular element in the question.

I'm currently investigating Option #2, so wish me luck :)

P.S: Thanks Capstone. It'll be done soon, I promise!

Edit: Apparently, the ability to filter an array by an array is not currently available in Limesurvey :( ... It's been logged as a feature request apparently, but since I'm too impatient to wait for them to implement it (which could take years depending on the size of their feature backlog) I guess I'll have to fall back to Option #1. Sigh.

Edit #2: Looks like you can filter arrays, as long as the array to *determine* the filter is comprised only of yes/no answers. Looks like a win, boys!
 
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^ True. Raw Evil, I'd hire you to do poll-based research for me, if I were in that kind of a position.
 
You do know it's not ready (or enabled) yet, right? o_O

I'm going to eat some dinner, then I'll finish it, then I'll post and let you know!
 
Okay, it's more or less finalised, but *please* don't announce that it's ready, because I won't be activating it yet. This is because of two things:

  1. Internet access in Australia is stupid and is based around data usage; I only get 50GB of transfer to play with per month (and it costs me $110, and I can't change providers because no other companies service my exchange :X)
  2. I have exceeded this month's 50GB limit by being a careless, responsible BitTorrent user who actually seeds what he leeches. :\

Also, I'm open to suggestions for replacements for the placeholder text:
  • "Test description field"
  • "Welcome message. Hello user etc."
  • "You finished the survey. Eventually this data will get posted on Bluelight."
  • Anything else as well :)
We're almost done! ZOMG!

Wait... Once we've *collected* the results.... does that mean one of us is planning on writing up some kind of formal conclusion for this "study"? Cause that'd be randomly awesome to get some kind of recognition.
 
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Eeep! I'm sorry, Raw Evil. When you posted that it was done, I just kind of assumed. I should've OK's this with you.

I'm going to add 'coming soon' to the title of the thread in Drug Studies, and then I'll wait for you to give me the signal to remove the 'coming soon' and announce that it's open.
 
Very well-done RE!

Again, some (hopfully constructive) criticism if you want it to be more statistically-useful:

1. Your 4-fold choices for the spirituality/religion question are actually good, however, the "not sure" option is, IMO, unnecessary, and introduces a lot of unwanted noise. In fact, I believe there is a specific name for this kind of unwanted bias, but I don't remember it. I suggest removing it. Again, the question is: if someone answers "not sure", what use do we have for this information and any that comes of it? Is "not sure" actually measurable in some way? Do NSers even count for all the following drug-related questions?

Generally speaking, it is easier for someone (especially stoners ;)) to be "not sure" than to be anything else. The option in and of itself is unintentionally biased.

2. Your very last question is, IMO, too broad in choice. I believe you can reduce one column from the middle of each side and not see a significant difference. If this is not possible, perhaps you could use a change in the wording to reflect such a breadth.

3. One thing you may want to reflect about: If a person DID undergo a significant spiritual change, but drugs came AFTER such a change, does the poll have any way of informing you of that? As it is designed, it seems to me that the poll just assumes that drugs came first. You have a mechanism for anchoring the age of the user; You have a mechanism for timing the drug-use. Do you have one for timing the spiritual transformation?

What about those who had two significant shifts, one due not to drugs, and another due to drugs? (ie. me :p).

Again, very well designed, but I offer the above in hopes of helping if you actually intend on extracting some statistically-significant data from it.
 
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Loving the feedback Jamshyd :)

1: I've removed "Not sure" from both current/previous. Spot on about the stoners too =D

2: I've removed options 3 and 5 from the final question - it now reads:
  • Strictly for spiritual use - I would never take <drug> for pure recreational purposes
  • I have only ever used <drug> spiritually, but am open to recreational use
  • Both spiritually and recreationally
  • I have only ever used <drug> recreationally, but am open to spiritual use
  • Strictly for recreational use - I would never take <drug> for pure spiritual purposes

3: I'm not sure what to do with regards to multiple shifts. Without building a complicated mechanism in the survey structure, getting detailed info here could be tricky. I personally wouldn't mind at all if I had to spend a day handcrafting a logical structure (I'm a programmer by day, so I enjoy the challenge hehe), as long as it didn't grow too far in complexity for the participants.

For the purposes of causality, I could add another question to the section, something along the lines of:
  • Did this change affect your viewpoint on drugs?
but it may be simpler, as you said, to simply prompt for an age to peg the events in a chronological order.
 
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