UKC

Hey everyone

I'm doing some research on craving associated with climbing and would really appreciate it if people would be willing to fill out my questionnaire...it's relatively painless

Cheers

Emma

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UniversityofGlamorganclimbingstudy

In reply to chikeree:

Done, good luck with your research.

In reply to chikeree:

Done. I think something very similar has been done before.

I'm on holiday a the moment and I'm properly knackered after climbing at my limit yesterday - I guess you've captured this with "how long ago did you last go climbing?".

What's difficult to capture is the variety in what "going climbing" means. If I was to go do some really amazing climbing, at my limit then it might have many of the suggested effects like making me forget about problems. But if I went bouldering or sport climbing it would probably make me *more* bored, *more* irritable, *less* satisfied with my life - I get really frustrated and that frustration can turn into despair on a bad day. Or if I went out soloing on routes I've done loads before it might not have much effect on my emotions at all because I do that so often...although sometimes it has a big effect - depends mainly on conditions and weather and what the atmosphere at the crag is like.

I'd be interested to hear a bit more about how you interpret the data.

In reply to chikeree:

Bit difficult answering sometimes when one is neither bored, depressed and all the other things you list in ones normal life!

In reply to chikeree:

Done. Looking forward to see the outcome of the data.

In reply to chikeree:

An unbelievably inane questionnaire. I can't even begin to talk about it, it's so bad. I suppose the overriding problems are that it is obsessed by how one is feeling right now, at this particular moment (as if that has any particular value); that it has no sense whatever of climbing being a developing story, a 'career', or long-running pastime or leisure activity; and that it's obviously pitched at c. 15-18 year olds, and no one else.

The fact that it's coming from a university I find quite dispiriting.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

I'm sure the same questions kept coming up, over and over again

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

I don't think you understand how this kind of research works.

There is essentially a single, narrow research question and this sort of survey generates data regarding that question. It isn't an outlet for people to express the complexity of what climbing means to them, so that a broad, qualitative analysis of people's motivations can be made. The focus is on the research question, not on what climbing means to you as an individual.

The questions will be tried and tested ways of measuring a specific psychological phenomenon. The data will provide evidence about whether and to what extent climbing is comparable with other behaviours that are expressions of that psychological phenomenon. Further down, does climbing act on the brain in similar ways to other addictive behaviours?


I think what you find dispiriting is that other people analyse the world systematically and scientifically rather than by telling stories.

In reply to Jon Stewart:


True


It didn't seem to allow any expression of the complexity of what climbing means. None at all.


This didn't seem to be either systematic or scientific. Just pure emotivism (plus a little bit typical pseudo-scientific nonsense about what 'grade' you happen to be climbing at the moment.).

In reply to chikeree:





Do you really need to have a seperate page with a "next" button for the 35 questions in section 2?

I gave up on question 4. If you want people to assist by completing the survey then don't make it unecessarily tedious.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

That isn't the purpose.


It's measuring the effect of climbing on short-term emotional states. It isn't about the wider aspects. The grade of the respondee is crucial. For people who climb E6, does climbing play a completely different role in their psychology to people who climb 5+ indoors?

In reply to Jon Stewart:


I struggle to understand the need for such inane research!

Have our universities really sunk this low in their quest for "stuff to research" ;(

In reply to chikeree:

Hi, done it.

No space to elaborate on anything, though? You getting any qualitative data at all?

Good luck

In reply to timjones:

Most research is pretty pointless.

Remember that since the proliferation of university courses to get everyone in the country a degree of some sort, lots of outdoor sports type courses have come along. There are departments "academicalising" everything from bolt-clipping to Bolton Wanderers now!

In reply to Jon Stewart:

It'll be interesting to see if any meaningful results are obtained from it. You know, something like those who climb E6 (well, have done a few routes graded E6 in the last couple of months) are 37 % very keen to go climbing, and 34% quite keen; and those climbing 5+ indoors are, e.g. 37 % very keen to go climbing, and 34% quite keen; or 27 % very and 44 % quite keen; or 99 per cent, or 1 per cent, or whatever ... cripes!

In reply to chikeree:

"...it's relatively painless "

It's cruel, I'm stuck at work looking out the window at the lovely weather and you keep asking me if I want to climb. Its like repeatedly saying walkies and waving a lead at your dog.

Were you trying to find out how many time people will answer pretty much the same question before they snap?

In reply to chikeree:

Sorry, too clicky for me. Good luck, but beware you're excluding people who's state of mind Right Now is 'I'd rather be climbing, looking for a distraction, but not one that proceeds Very Slowly Indeed'

In reply to 999thAndy:

It did rephrase some questions and ask them again. It's a technique that helps to assess the internal validity of the answers (i.e. if answers are different when the same question is asked again in a different way then the answers are less valid). Mildly irritating, but useful scientifically.

With respect to Gordon's concerns about it: the whole design is quantitative rather than qualitative so is not going to cover complex ideas like that. I imagine there are predefined axes of psychological values (e.g. stress, mood, etc.) rather than looking for new information / ideas from participants. It's not trying to find out about the complexity of climbing.

As Jon has said, there will be pre-specified hypotheses. i.e. comparing people's position on various psychological axes to how long they have been since climbing / grade they climb / type of climbing they do / etc.

I thought it was good, and probably about the right length. The key to designing questionnaires like this is simplicity - if you try and answer too many research questions then you fail to prove any of them statistically because you don't get the response numbers required.

In reply to dapoy:


Agree! Doing the questionnaire made me want to go climbing more. I wonder if that will bias the results...

In reply to splat2million:

But the thing gets off to a spectacularly bad start with those mutually exclusive buttons. What happens if you're equally keen on rock climbing and Ice climbing? Those categories would surely have been much better as options you could rank in order of preference (and even that would remain very artificial in relation to real life).

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

I don't think you'd be much good at research if that's how you'd analyse the data

In reply to splat2million:

Overall, the problem with it is that it falls into that very old fallacy of trying to quantify qualititative judgements.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Let others judge my abilities at research, I say.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


And then have a massive branching tree type thing where you have to answer all the questions for all different types you like? Or just to have a little bit of extra data about the secondary and tertiary interests of the respondee?

It's about answering a research question, not about allowing the respondee to express themselves!

In reply to chikeree:

Anyone who has any form of training plan etc wont be able to answer a bunch of your questions with the options provided.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


So shall we just close down all the psychology, economics, psychiatry departments then? It's all worthless because it takes a statistical rather than qualitative approach?

Qualitative research has some applicability some of the time. You can't get a representative picture by interviewing people, you can only get a detailed picture of a small number of experiences which might or might not represent what is going on in the world.

Your way might not be the best way to answer this question. Given that you don't even know what the question is, how are you so confident that your way is best?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

True, that might make it more meaningful to answer for a few people; but it would make it much more difficult to analyse. Changing that variable type as you suggest to a ranked order would reduce the ability of the study to make conclusions about people's main climbing discipline because many more people would need to do the questionnaire.

Depending on the numbers she expects to answer the questionnaire it would probably mean the difference between statistical significance and not.

Statistical significance is the difference between being able to say "63.7% of people with x did y" (i.e. the sort of rubbish science you see on shampoo adverts) and "x is associated with an increase in y (p<0.05)".

In reply to abarro81:


Yes, this is similar to what I was saying above about "going climbing" not being one thing. If sometimes it means doing circuits on a board and other times it's trying a route that's a massive deal, then these questions aren't going to be applicable.

It works quite well for someone like me whose relationship with climbing is more like going out and doing drugs than it is like sport.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


I don't think this is a fallacy, it's a type of research.

Lets say that you have the null hypothesis:
Time since climbing has no relation to level of stress.
and the alternative hypothesis:
Increased time since climbing is associated with increased stress and desire to climb, this effect is greater the higher grade climbed.

How can you answer this with qualitative methods?

In reply to splat2million:

Speaking of which, did you know that Nicolas Cage was responsible for all those deaths in swimming pools? http://www.tylervigen.com/

In reply to splat2million:

But where are your (truly) quantitative methods?

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Of course, if your research questions was different, e.g.:
"What factors influence a climber's desire to go climbing and stress levels?"

A qualitative or mixed methods approach as you suggest would be more appropriate.

In reply to SteveRi:


Love it!

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


Sorry I'm not sure I understand the question, but the ordinal scales used in the questionnaire are pretty standard in this sort of research and are exclusively quantitative.

In reply to splat2million:

Possibly the whole enterprise of trying to 'analyse' it is fundamentally flawed anyway? Certainly at this superficial level of alleged climbing grades and fleeting present emotions.

In reply to SteveRi:


This is brilliant! (Although a correlation coefficient of 0.67 isn't terribly strong, and what is the p value for the correlation?)

It illustrates the hazards of interpreting quantitative data (particularly in a graphic format).

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

But think about what climbing grade is a proxy for - it tells you something about someone's behaviour over the period since they started climbing.

In reply to Jon Stewart:

OK, agreed. But then you'd have to look very closely at that history, that whole history.

In reply to splat2million:

Some of the others are better, I just wanted to pin something on Cage

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

So are you suggesting that we cannot analyse psychology so should just not bother?
While this study is hardly going to save the world, the methods you are objecting to are used throughout psychological research.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


While you could do that, is it worth the time?

Lets say there are 500 responses to the questionnaire. As it currently stands that data is all quantitative so can simply be analysed in the form it is in. Analysis will probably take the form of some sort of regression or general linear model or something. It would probably take the student a few days, with support from a statistician.
500 responses in text format, with a detailed history of each climb, and everything else going on in their life, would take months to go through and analyse.

Many months later, you will have conclusions which are so complicated, that they are meaningless. Loads more data, but fewer conclusions.

In reply to splat2million:

I would have thought that you can only analyse something much more precise than emotions (or, to put it more exactly, vague abstract emotive questions). Psychoanalysis has little to do with 'analysis' in the sense that it's used here, or in which you're now using it. Surely?

In reply to splat2million:


Well, yes

And no, in answer to your previous question, but applied to the whole subject, probably not worth the time.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:


This research is psychology, nothing to do with psychoanalysis.

In reply to Gordon Stainforth:

Yes, but psychoanalysis is a different tool altogether. Psychoanalysis (and many other psychological therapies) are directed at exploring feelings and events in a very specific way. I don't know of any psychoanalytical research, although it probably exists (it's not really my area of interest, indeed I'm not really into psychology normally).

When I say analysis, I refer to analysis of the data not of the psyche. Using a very blunt tool to convert these abstract emotive feelings into numbers is not the best way to explore the individual's thoughts but is a good way to quickly generate large amounts of data from lots of people.

You also say that this is not worth the time, but you should also remember who's time it is. A student will have their time in to it, but will get a degree out of it, and a tutor is supervising and being paid to do so. The educational benefit of student research is important and no good research can be done by an individual until they have learnt to research by doing lots of cheap rubbish research.

In reply to chikeree:

With a howling spelling error early on in the survey(did no one proofread it?),I couldn't see it as a serious piece of work,but for some reason persevered,but,like others,got bored of all the clicks involved.

In reply to chikeree:

Q5 in Part 2 has two "Disagree" buttons and no "Neither agree or disagree" button.