Edit 3: See new post (soon)
Edit 2: it seems the survey was locked, but maybe you can still take it. Just in case I got a screenshot of the results at 301 answers.
Edit: the survey will forcibly lock when it receives 300 responses 😱 (we’re at 287 right now)
Unfortunately, survey software is a cartel on the Internet and they have huge restrictions on free users. I was not aware that questionpro locked surveys beyond a certain point for free users, and we just received an email that they would lock our survey once it reaches that response rate. And of course the only solution is to buy their expensive plan ($1.2k a year).
300 is a very confident amount still, seeing that our monthly user rate is ~350. It just sucks for the people that will not be able to take the survey.
Next time I’m using Google Forms. Google sucks but at least they don’t cap you in the knees like this.
Or if anyone knows open source survey software we can use, that would be amazing 😀 (we also run surveys on ProleWiki sometimes)
You asked for it, now we’re doing it.
This survey will run for around a week, so please take it ASAP!
At the end of it we’ll analyse the results and will finally be able to answer the question that’s on everyone’s mind: is half of Lemmygrad trans?
Disclaimer: all questions are optional, meaning you can skip them if you don’t want to answer. The survey should take around 5 minutes to complete. It asks personal questions, but all answers are anonymous. We do get your country code when you submit your answers, so use a VPN BEFORE you open the survey (but don’t retake the test). Otherwise we really can’t identify you.
If we missed any question or anything is unclear, please post it ASAP so that we can fix it before too many people take the survey.
It’s a delicate balance between offering too many choices and atomising the results (to the point that the data becomes meaningless), and not offering enough choices and alienating some users.
In your case, which choice would you have put in if it was available? Note that there is also an Other option where users can type their own answer.
Since the survey has received hundreds of answers so far it’s not possible to change the options for this one, but we’ll take all the feedback into account for next year if we run it again! This will also be noted when we present the results.
TL;DR: I’d separate race from ethnicity.
I completely understand that! I think the survey is overall pretty good, and just wanted to add some perspective for future surveys if this place ever gets very big and international. On how I would have structured it, I don’t have anything close to a perfect solution, but I’d probably separate the concepts of ethnicity and race into 2 distinct questions.
In the US-ian traditional view, ethnicity and race are heavily interlinked, but that is not the case in many non-“white” countries. In my admittedly very limited view, ethnicity is usually linked to a personal cultural identity, so I would personally have marked something like Latino (not Hispanic), Brazilian or if on a less international level, Nordestino. However race is (imo) usually defined by those at the top and varies widely per country, so in Brazil I’m white, but in the USA I’m latino, and depending on the time period I could have been categorized as “half-black” due to having black grandparents. While ethnicity is much easier to choose, race is actually very relative and subject to the racism of any particular culture. I personally marked white, as that is my current experience of race, but that is not at all my ethnicity and I do align way more with “Latinos” than with Anglo/European white people in culture and identification.
So, if I were to propose a minor change for a future one, I’d just allow for selecting multiple races at the same time, but making it so that you can always put some small explanation like (“white in Brazil”) without having to mark “Other”. But on a larger scale with more people answering, I’d make it two separate questions. One for broad ethnicity (say Mezoamerican, Sulamerican, Caribbean) which is already somewhat indirectly accounted for by the “Which continent are you from”, and changing the “country you’re from” for a more specific free-form ethnicity/nationality question. I understand that this last one could create a large overhead on processing all the badly formatted or rarer ethnicities, so take it with a grain of salt.
And then I’d add another for “race” for specifically how that person is racialized in their society, such as “Native American, Black, East Asian, White, Latino, etc”, being allowed to select multiple at once. This of course isn’t perfect, but I think is a good direction to reduce ambiguity of whether it is the person’s designated race in their own land or the one they’d be assigned in the USA/Europe lands.
Thanks for the reply too! And I’d love to help with anything else that I can in here if y’all need it! I have some programming and data science experience and am really hopeful for this forum.
P.S.: really minor and unnecessary point, but I also missed a “non-amorous” option in the relationship status which a very “me” thing and is not important at all, but since I’m here…
Thanks for the exhaustive reply, we’ll take all of this into account for the 2024 survey! I see that many people were confused on the wording of the question (also happened with the continents question). I know exactly what caused the problem; the questions evolved rapidly and when I’d added say some continents to pick from, I then realised they didn’t give much interesting data and added others. Then that changed the nature of the question, which I’d edit, and then you go through that process 3 or 4 more times until there’s a mismatch between the question and the choices.
A second opinion should have been provided on the survey unfortunately all the other admins are busy at this time and nobody gave me feedback on the survey, so I take full responsibility for the questions being confusing lol.
But it still gives interesting data, in fact there’s a very fun thing that came out of the results that I can’t wait to share… in a week, so that everyone has time to take the survey.