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

[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.