A friend of mine somehow convinced his institute of higher education that we wargamers are worth one of them thar fancy science studies... in internet questionnaire form, of course.
The link: https://wmsurveys.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_dgHSGWSJ6bxXM1L
I participated in something of a trial run, and the live interview took in the neighborhood of an hour (I'm sure filling it out online would be much, much faster). Details can be found by following the link. It's completely confidential and anonymous.
Please check it out! Your answers support fellow gamers... and science!!
interesting to look at the political views of gamers.
ReplyDeletecool, I'd love to see the results of this. (pity I cant join in because I'm not American)
ReplyDeleteInteresting... interesting indeed...
ReplyDeleteI'll be in some corner...
CK
All the stuff about vague groups checking for racism or similar affinities is just weird. Also wonder which 40K armies correlates with blue and red.
ReplyDeleteHey! Foodie, thanks for posting this! This is Ian, from andygomez.wordpress.com - I am the primary investigator for this survey. Thanks to everyone here who has taken it so far!
ReplyDelete@ Col. Ackland - My apologies this study is limited to citizens of the US. There were some tricky issues with this for the process of approval by the college, but also the emphasis on political preferences is very much focused on American politics. Specifically, are you registered to vote, and what are the main inputs that cause you to vote the way you do, etc. So I am very grateful for your interest, and sorry you cannot take the survey itself. I hope that in the future, others will build off this research and take it to other countries, or even to multiple countries at once.
As for the results, yes! I will be posting them online, open to the public. BellOfLostSouls.net will be hosting it, but I will be putting links to it in several places. I also hope to release the data itself if I am allowed to!
@ eriochrome - Yes, I definitely understand your feeling about the last component of the study. Those 16 questions (strongly agree to strongly disagree with these 16 statements, I mean) are a tool from the Psychology literature for measuring Social Dominance Orientation. I was unable to alter the questions if I wanted to keep the tool, so I decided to risk it. It does seem to be getting a lot of bad press, too...
But yeah, I am very interested to look at relationships like whether certain armies correlate with certain geographic areas, certain political beliefs, certain Social Dominance Orientation values... Glad you're interested!
The last sixteen questions...
DeleteJust struck me as odd. I made a comment on one that 'stuck out'. Anyway...
Glad the corner could help!
CK
I'd be careful about the legitimacy of your results. As a researcher myself, you really cannot claim that this survey is giving you a good sample of the population, because it does not represent the entire population and they are bias - in other words, they only draw from people who visit these blogs and then choose to fill out the survey. Online surveys are often discouraged in our research because of this.
DeleteOr you could just identify your population as "wargamers who visit blogs and have the time to fill out surveys," but you could not make an inference back to the population of wargamers in the US.
Sorry. I'm just a nit-picker for things like this. Ignore me if ya just don't care. heh.
@ Tim - yes, that is certainly the biggest limitation of this survey. However, I think noting the population as you described is not such a blow to the results. All surveys have limitations. For example; this survey is also heavily dependent on self-reporting, which does not equate to "Truth" with that capital T. But I think we'd be hard pressed to find a better way to reach wargamers in the United States in a broader-reaching way than an online survey.
DeleteProbably. I suppose making random phone calls and asking people if they are wargamers or not, then asking them a bunch of questions, is totally impractical. If there is one thing I've learned about research, is that sometimes you have to do the best with what you have. Good luck!
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