Completed Online survey - Can you spare a few minutes for research?

Dunnit ~ if I'd known how long it was gonna take I never would have done it !


fuckin questions with 'defined' answers that don't fuckin fit one ~ :! :! :! :!



Hope it's of some use to someone :)
 
I also did the survey myself a week or so ago, and had some difficulty working out how to answer some of the questions. And also noticed the bias towards negatives inherent in the survey.

Having been an Honours student in psychology in a past life though, we have to remember that the time frame for the research is very tight. And most of the time this is the first project the student has ever done. So, hopefully she'll learn a lot from it - and I'm sure she'll be interested in these comments too, which she can learn from for next time!

The difficulty for me with the crux of the survey - comparing indoor and outdoor partying on different types of drugs - is that overall, I tend to 'party indoors' pretty much all of the time, when I am 'partying'. So there isn't much variation in my responses to the most important question in the survey. Hopefully other folk have more varied 'partying' patterns than I do ;)
 
MrM said:
Tronica - what will these results be used for? Hopefully nothing important. Will your researcher friend get a chance to see any of these comments?
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I think it's best I get the survey author to respond to that one. I'll send her an email and get her on here to discuss.
 
Geographical location and seasonality seem to have been ignored !!!!!!



I think some relevance could be found in this ?
 
I thought it was since you last used... oops.


I thought it was kinda leading too.

Also doing surveys like that make me feel REALLY fucked up :(
 
B9 said:
Good description of you I reckon ~ a little crazy but cheerful :) <3
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haha thanks, i also had to ask if i was on any drugs at this specific time, actually being serious as well.... unfortunatly i was not, but aparantly my brain is a little broke :S
 
Here's Kylie's response:

Thank you to everyone who has completed the survey. In response to the comments made so far:

1) As a general comment, scientific research is conducted to try to help the community. Constructive comments are very useful in helping researchers of all levels do better work, so if you have a problem with some aspect of a piece of research then offer a suggestion on how you think this problem could be overcome. Negative comments and suggestions that researchers are conducting their work with underlying intentions are not useful and are often difficult to respond to as some people have already made up their minds about an issue and are not open to discussions about it.

2) The questions are not set up to lead to a predetermined outcome. As pointed out by one person, every survey can be viewed as sounding biased. The survey includes some well tested, well known mood inventories (tests) and while some people may not like the tone of the questions, thesequestions are useful in helping researchers to collect meaningful data. The aim of scientific research, such as this, is to research a topic as objectively as possible and that is what we have set out to do.

3) When completing any survey, always give the answer that feels best to you. It is then the researchers issue to determine if the information collected in their survey is meaningful and useful data. It is not my place to say whether people do/do not, have/have not or should/should not feel depressed so I am not going to respond to those comments.

4) Some questions in the survey are difficult to answer and we expect that people will give crude estimates (e.g. drug use questions). We realise that responses to these questions are not going to be "perfect" answers and that is fine. Answers to these questions will give us an indication of how much someone has used a particular substance or range of substances in comparison to the rest of the people who have participated in our research, so everyone's answers are relative to one another.

5) Geographical location and seasonality are areas of importance that were not included in this initial survey. Based on the outcome of this pilot research this is certainly something we would like to investigate in future studies.

6) The results may be used for publishing a paper in an international journal. Any published papers are open for scrutiny by other researchers and keeping in mind the difficulties and limitations of conducting this type of research highly relevant concerns and feedback are published. If there are major concerns about this research rest assured that at an international level where this research may be publicized there is the opportunity for other researchers to make similar public comment and to debate these issues.

7) Finally, this research is being conducted as part of my honours degree which means there has been very little time to put the whole project together (i.e. less than 8 months to research the area, put a questionnaire together that is meaningful, collect data, interpret that data and write up a report; comparatively people doing a PhD have 3 years to do this) and as such there will inevitably be some oversights in my research. That said, I have researched this area previously and have published that work internationally. Regardless of my experience, I have researched this area extensively, tried to use the best methods available and based my questionnaire on one made available to me by other researchers who have been researching this area for decades and who have an extensive list of publications in this area. If you are still unhappy with my research then there is little I can do except for thanking you for taking the time to look at the survey and for passing on your comments. I am truly grateful for how generous people have been with their time which ultimately helps to further our research and knowledge into important issues.

Thanks,
Kylie.
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Your friend really really should have worded that better, half way though i just got pissed because it seemed to be angled at ppl who "party" I go 2 partys on occasion but i much rather a one person party.. The whole thing made me really really aggravated no offense.
 
Kylie's said:
Thank you to everyone who has completed the survey. In response to the comments made so far:

1) As a general comment, scientific research is conducted to try to help the community. Constructive comments are very useful in helping researchers of all levels do better work, so if you have a problem with some aspect of a piece of research then offer a suggestion on how you think this problem could be overcome. Negative comments and suggestions that researchers are conducting their work with underlying intentions are not useful and are often difficult to respond to as some people have already made up their minds about an issue and are not open to discussions about it.
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Hmmmm... given that this forum has seen it's fair share of research proposals, it's members have some considerable experience in completing these questionnaires. As has been raised by previous studies advertised on here, questionnaire-based research into drug use is littered with bias - almost to the point of being comical. If you're going to make a survey public, you've got to expect some public criticism.
2) The questions are not set up to lead to a predetermined outcome. As pointed out by one person, every survey can be viewed as sounding biased. The survey includes some well tested, well known mood inventories (tests) and while some people may not like the tone of the questions, thesequestions are useful in helping researchers to collect meaningful data. The aim of scientific research, such as this, is to research a topic as objectively as possible and that is what we have set out to do.
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What are your research questions? PM me if you feel disclosure would 'bias' your results. :D
3) When completing any survey, always give the answer that feels best to you. It is then the researchers issue to determine if the information collected in their survey is meaningful and useful data. It is not my place to say whether people do/do not, have/have not or should/should not feel depressed so I am not going to respond to those comments.
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That's wrong on so many levels. If people are having difficulty understanding a survey question and are able to give a variety of different answers to the same question, then, in effect, and across your entire sample, you'll have people answering entirely different questions. In essence, due to poor question definition, you're applying a different survey to each person who takes it due to the degree of interpretation involved. That can't be written off as "just give the answer that feels best to you"... that's obvious. But there shouldn't be any "feel" involved. The question should be clear and leave no question in the mind of the participant as to what information they are being asked for. Subjective interpretation of survey questions is an ever-present error, but it is one that can be effectively minimised with credible scoping and piloting. Frankly, if you're already anticipating the removal of data due to it being unusable, then that doesn't fill me with confidence.
4) Some questions in the survey are difficult to answer and we expect that people will give crude estimates (e.g. drug use questions). We realise that responses to these questions are not going to be "perfect" answers and that is fine. Answers to these questions will give us an indication of how much someone has used a particular substance or range of substances in comparison to the rest of the people who have participated in our research, so everyone's answers are relative to one another.
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Wrong. It's all NOT relative baby!"

If everybody is using a different definition of scale then, as has already been pointed out, it would be possible for someone to give an estimate almost twice their 'actual' usage, and for another person to give an estimate of less than half. Relativity is not the same as chaos.
5) Geographical location and seasonality are areas of importance that were not included in this initial survey. Based on the outcome of this pilot research this is certainly something we would like to investigate in future studies.
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Ahhhhh... so it is a pilot. If anything, I'd say the critical appraisal you've got in this thread will give you more to work with than the actual data itself.
6) The results may be used for publishing a paper in an international journal. Any published papers are open for scrutiny by other researchers and keeping in mind the difficulties and limitations of conducting this type of research highly relevant concerns and feedback are published. If there are major concerns about this research rest assured that at an international level where this research may be publicized there is the opportunity for other researchers to make similar public comment and to debate these issues.
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Ha ha! Aiming a little high for an honour degree aren't we?
7) Finally, this research is being conducted as part of my honours degree which means there has been very little time to put the whole project together (i.e. less than 8 months to research the area, put a questionnaire together that is meaningful, collect data, interpret that data and write up a report; comparatively people doing a PhD have 3 years to do this) and as such there will inevitably be some oversights in my research. That said, I have researched this area previously and have published that work internationally.
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You've published internationally BEFORE your honours degree??? That's impressive. Any chance of PM'ing me a link for it/them? I've got a corporate Blackwell Synergy account that could use a bashing.
Regardless of my experience, I have researched this area extensively, tried to use the best methods available and based my questionnaire on one made available to me by other researchers who have been researching this area for decades and who have an extensive list of publications in this area. If you are still unhappy with my research then there is little I can do except for thanking you for taking the time to look at the survey and for passing on your comments. I am truly grateful for how generous people have been with their time which ultimately helps to further our research and knowledge into important issues.

Thanks,
Kylie.
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As above, I wouldn't put a great deal of faith into previous survey-research into drug use.

Best of luck.
 
3) When completing any survey, always give the answer that feels best to you. It is then the researchers issue to determine if the information collected in their survey is meaningful and useful data. It is not my place to say whether people do/do not, have/have not or should/should not feel depressed so I am not going to respond to those comments.
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Have you ever felt depressed before, during or after using ecstasy?
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Can you at least tell me what you mean by this question? I simply can't work out which of the answers 'feels best' for me becauase i don't understand the question.

Any given moment in time is either before, during or after any given event. So when you ask 'Have you ever felt depressed before, during or after using ecstasy?' you seem to just be asking have i ever felt depressed. Since it doesn't make sense to phrase the question this way i have to guess that you are asking about the time just before, during or after, but this again leaves me guessing how long you mean.

Without further information i am having to guess the meaning of the question and answer according to that guess. I wouldn't expect everyone to interpret the question in the same way, so as tambourine-man pointed out;

tambourine-man said:
If people are having difficulty understanding a survey question and are able to give a variety of different answers to the same question, then, in effect, and across your entire sample, you'll have people answering entirely different questions.
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If I answer the question truthfully then i'd have to say that since i have felt depressed at some point in my life (due to death of a friend, pet, whatever), even though i don't suffer from depression in a serious way, i would have to answer 'yes'. But then i think to myself 'what is the point in asking a question that everyone would have to answer 'yes' to, except a few psychos who have never felt depression for any reason ever?' so i think to answer 'no' because i don't feel that the depression i have experienced was due to the ecstasy. By answering truthfully, yes, i could be giving you results that can be used to show a link between ecstasy use and depression, even though my 'yes' answer shows no such thing (in my particular case).

Do you see the problem here?

To put it another way, if someone asked you 'have you ever felt depressed before, during or after listening to classical music?' how would you answer? I would have to say 'yes', then i would worry the results of the questions would be used to demonstrate a link between classical music and depression.
 
This is a very poorly thought out and worded questionnaire. I gave up half way through.
 
What is your average number of trips of hallucinogens, or equivalent, consumed per use?
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Ignoring the fact its just a stupid question anyway, it is also fallacious. Its based on the preconception that people bang multiple amounts of drugs these days because we've all turned into drug nutters when in fact the main reason some people take multiple amounts of drugs, particularly LSD, these days is because MOST DRUGS ARE WEAK AS PISS compared to what they used to be.

Which is another winner for the War on Drugs.

How many times in your life have you used cannabis?
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1,643,279. Next question.
 
Trying to guess how many times I'd used certain drugs was a bit silly imo. There could have been a multiple choice option on that one for once, less than 5 times, 5-20 times and more than 20 times. Or something similar anyway, rather than typing in 99999999.
 
i got to the bit about my tobacco use and it wouldn't let me type in the box and therefore gave in.

soz man
 
I did about 15 minutes worth then it said 'webpage has expired' :X

I agree that some of the questions are poorly worded, and I hope you take the feedback you've been given here into account when you're considering your results...but I also know how little time you get to conduct a psych honours research project and how difficult it can be. God knows mine had loads of methodological problems, but it was also never going to be published either so I was spared that responsibility.

Good luck. :)
 
Sorry to derail slightly, but you might be interested to know that apparently there are people who are never depressed. I don't know how accurate this is but it makes for fun reading.
http://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedonist.htm#0

A small minority of humans do in fact experience states of indefinitely prolonged euphoria. These states of involuntary well-being are usually pathologised as "manic". Unlike unipolar depression, sustained unipolar mania is very rare. Other folk who just have high "hedonic set-points", but who aren't manic or bipolar, are sometimes described as "hyperthymic" instead. This isn't a common mindset either

...

Today, euphoric (hypo-)mania is liable to be clinically subdued with drugs. ["Hypomania" denotes simply a milder mania.] Toxic "medication" can depress elevated mood to duller but "normal" levels. Such flatter and supposedly healthier levels of emotion enable otherwise euphoric people to function within contemporary society. Compliance with a medically-dictated treatment-regimen (lithium, sodium valproate, carbamazepine, etc.) will be enhanced if the victim can be persuaded that euphoric well-being is pathological. (S)he can then look for warning signs and symptoms. By the norms of our genetically-enriched posterity, however, it is the rest of us who are chronically unwell - if not more so. Contemporary standards of mental health are just pathologically low. Our super-well descendants, by contrast, will enjoy a glorious spectrum of new options for mental super-health. They may opt to combine emotional stability, resilience and "serotonergic" serenity, for instance, with the goal-oriented energy, optimism and initiative of a raw "dopaminergic" high.
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Well that IS interesting KissTheSky, and not completely irrelevent either, because it is only these few exceptional (lucky?) people who could truthfully answer 'yes' that they had never felt 'depressed before, during or after using ecstasy' simply because they had never felt depressed.

So this demonstrates even more so that there should be an option between no and yes to account for all the 'normal' people who are depressed occasionally but don't suffer from problems with 'depression'.

Kylie said:
3) When completing any survey, always give the answer that feels best to you. It is then the researchers issue to determine if the information collected in their survey is meaningful and useful data. It is not my place to say whether people do/do not, have/have not or should/should not feel depressed so I am not going to respond to those comments.
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I really think you should respond to this one Kylie, not because you should be telling people wether or not they should feel depressed, but because you should at least acknowledge that normal people do feel depressed some of the time, and by giving only a yes or no choice to a question on depression, most people who answer honestly will have to say 'yes', lumping their results together with those people who take ectasy several times a week and have cronically reduced the quantities of seratonin in their heads rendering them permanently depessed due to drug abuse.

I think it is questions like this that incline people to suspect your survey of bias, because if you take these 'yes' results as demonstative of the fact that drug use causes depression you'll be able to show a strong link that may or may not in fact actually exist.
 
Not talking on Kylie's behalf this time, just from my own experience with the survey in question:

Personally, I found the depression before, during, after question OK. I answered it in the context of some kind of time limit, ie. a few days before, a few days after. I do think it would have been better if this was defined in the survey - so everyone was working with the same time frame. So I thought, to what extent am I depressed in the lead-up to, during, and in the few days after ecstasy use? I guess this would be more of a problem to answer if you are clinically depressed anyway (thus answering yes not due to drug use, but due to normal disposition). However this can be factored into the analysis because a question was also asked (at the beginning) about current levels of depression).

Another thing of interest from my perspective (as an Australian) is that there may be different levels of suspicion of negative bias across different countries. I think in Australia people *generally* trust researchers motives. My experience as a research interviewer (in-person interviews) was that about 10% of drug users I interviewed were concerned to the point of asking for additional information about the funder, what the results would be used for, etc etc. The other 90% simply didn't care or trusted the University based research. Usually they wanted me to rush through consent/info, because they genuinely did not suspect us of anything at all negative.

This may not be warranted in other countries, where perhaps more biased research actually is funded and happens? (This is a question, feel free to debate!)

Not saying all Aussie research is bias-free, far from it. But I think some of this may be a cultural difference which wasn't initially anticipated. Just a thought! Something worth considering for all those attempting international studies...
 
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