For Science!

[twigged.livejournal.com]

<a href="http://fanficsurvey.appspot.com" target="_blank">
<img src="http://fanficsurvey.appspot.com/images/Banner.jpg"
alt="Fan Fiction Survey" height="256px" width="487px"/></a>


I think this is only crack_van's 2nd off-topic post in the past six years, and so a word of explanation: Last month the neuroscientists who developed this survey got in touch with me through the comm with the idea of distributing a survey to fandom at large. They wanted to share the final data with fandom and other researchers in a fandom-controlled space, and asked if they could do so here. This research will be groundbreaking in their field, and in all of our many discussions over the past month+ they have been unfailingly respectful of fandom's traditions and concerns, and so I was happy to agree.

There's a FAQ explaining their project HERE, and feedback and discussion is invited over on ogi_ogas's journal.

Please repost far and wide!


ETA: Please feel free to continue to comment here as desired. I've posted some additional info and my own thoughts here.

ETA 2: I WAS WRONG.

Comments

[altogetherisi.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I went into it with good faith, even though the very first question was messed up, and the gender!fail and race!fail was pretty awful right from the start, and then gave up in disgust before I was halfway through because I couldn't stand the ignorance and bias displayed.

I am quite disappointed that crack_van endorsed this survey and encourages it to be passed around; rather, should have taken a page out of kink bingo's book, with truly exceptional and decisive refusal.

[sparkymonster.livejournal.com]

Tell me about the Race!Fail? No one mentioned it to me.

[altogetherisi.livejournal.com]

On the "what race are you" kinda question, the only options were white, black, hipanic and asian. There might have been a write in box for Other as well, I can't remember.
But that set all kinds of warnings for me; professional surveys that ask race questions usually have loads of options - I'm was particularly weirded out by them lumping Indian, Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Pakastani etc all together under Asian, and I didn't like that you could only select one option, meaning those of mixed race either had to explain in other or pick the one the identified with most.
I mean, it was just one of those things that I picked up on being less than professional standard, and considering I was already kinda annoyed by the gender questions at the beginning, it was adding up even before they started asking about slash or whatever...

[sparkymonster.livejournal.com]

Wow. The fucking US census has better race categories than that. There are pretty standardized forms, in the US, for collecting data on race and ethnicity. Multi-racial has been an option on the US Census since 2000 and you can easily find that information on the census website (http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/race/racefactcb.html) or by talking to a Government Documents librarian (BU has one (http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/govdocs/index.html))

Nothing is quite as othering as literally having to select "I am OTHER" on a survey.