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Could you please spare 10 minutes and take my survey?

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menon.nikita16 01 Jul 2016
Hello Everyone! This survey is a part of my Masters dissertation. Anybody who is 18 years and above and a regular rock-climber, please help me out by filling out my questionnaires. There are no right or wrong answers.
The aim of the research is to prove that there is a relationship between craving for rock climbing and sensation seeking. It will take around 15 minutes.
One of the benefits would also be that we're trying to see if extreme sports could be used as an alternative therapeutic treatment for addiction.

Here is the link to my survey : https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZX7LM39


*Posted with permission of UKClimbing*
2
 climbwhenready 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

> The aim of the research is to prove that there is a relationship between craving for rock climbing and sensation seeking.

Well, that's not a very unbiased approach, is it.
1
 john arran 01 Jul 2016
In reply to climbwhenready:

> Well, that's not a very unbiased approach, is it.

It wouldn't need to be an unbiased aim to produce a good result but if you start off with a one-sided hypothesis like that you need very much more convincing data for it to be statistically significant.
1
 climbwhenready 01 Jul 2016
In reply to john arran:

Formally you'd also need to be proving there is no relationship between rock climbing and sensation seeking
 gribble 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Sorry, I had to give up on this survey. It made far too many assumptions and presented questions where neither options were even close. To answer it in any way at that point would invalidate any useful information.
 herbe_rouge 01 Jul 2016
In reply to john arran:

Actually, no. For significance the result must exceed the alpha level. In social sciences this is typically 0.05 (ie the result is deemed significant if the likelihood of obtaining it by chance is less than 5%). For a two-tailed hypothesis (eg climbers have different sensation seeking scores to the typical population) that means evaluating whether the result fell into the very low or very high portions of the distribution i.e. the top or bottom 2.5%. If you're testing a one-tailed hypothesis (eg climbers have higher sensation seeking scores than the typical population) then you're only evaluating the very high portion of the distribution i.e. the top 5%. Thus the results required to achieve significance for a one-tailed hypothesis may be far less 'convincing'. The real problem is the OP's use of "prove" - a significant result indicates the probability that the result occurred by chance - in the case of social science it indicates that if you ran the experiment 100 times you'd expect to get your result 5 times on the basis of chance alone - significance does not "prove" anything, the construct of "proof" is simply not appropriate nor relevant to scientific inquiry.
 john arran 01 Jul 2016
In reply to herbe_rouge:

You're right, of course. Sorry, my stats is a bit rusty and I appear to have been talking from the wrong part of my anatomy! From what I can read into the OP the opposite effect cannot be ruled out either so a one-sided test is unlikely to be appropriate anyway. Thanks for the correction.
 Chris Craggs Global Crag Moderator 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Any chance of editing the title - it is towards a Masters after all,

Chris
 herbe_rouge 01 Jul 2016
In reply to john arran:

You're absolutely right - if a one-tailed hypothesis is to be tested it has to be stated a priori and theoretically motivated. Otherwise the study is artificially inflating the chance of a false positive. Given that 1 in every 20 'significant' results in social science are simply chance events and that most non-significant results are not published, interpretation is non-trivial. Apologies, for dragging this on, my feeble attempt to take my mind off the rather more weighty issue of the complete and utter mess that is brexit.... Apparently the entire body politic is having difficulty in interpreting empirical evidence..... plus ca change......
1
 ChrisH89 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

It would certainly be better phrased more like "The aim of the research is to investigate whether any relationship exists between craving for rock climbing and sensation seeking". Of course you still need to personally approach the research from that perspective, changing the title doesn't automatically change the methodology! Also the sentence "Do rock climbers with high sensation seeking experience more craving?" doesn't really make sense, although I get what you mean by it.

Some of the questions seem a little too polarised; for example, "I would like to meet some persons who are homosexual (men or women)" or "I stay away from anyone I suspect of being “gay or lesbian”". Why no option for "I have no preference for whether people I meet are gay or lesbian"?! Lots of others where I didn't really identify with either option.

Just some feedback. Anyway, I filled in the survey.
 David Sz 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

A bit long, but did it anyway . . . and now want to go climbing
 summo 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

sorry, gave up on the questions beyond 50.... so many questions to which I simply do not care at all about the subjects. I feel neither positively or negatively against so many of those topics, to pick one that suited me best would be lying in either case.
 Greasy Prusiks 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

I got to the repeated question at question 31-32 and gave up, sorry. If I'm brutally honest I'm surprised that questionnaire is Masters level work.

Regardless good luck with your dissertation.
 hazeysunshine 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Done. Some of your pairs of statements are not opposites on the same spectrum. For example having an opinion on something is different from liking or wanting something. I could have ticked both in some cases.

Your sample size is not large enough to 'prove' anything, (at Masters level that's perfectly reasonable) and your respondents are self-selecting.

A better wording for your aim would therefore be "to establish whether or not there is a relationship between craving for rock climbing and sensation seeking".


 JDC 01 Jul 2016
In reply to Greasy Prusiks:

Yep, gave up about here too. As others have said, some of the questions meant nothing to me and I couldn't select either of the options. Sorry - I did try!

 Jon Read 01 Jul 2016
In reply to hazeysunshine:

> Your sample size is not large enough to 'prove' anything, (at Masters level that's perfectly reasonable) and your respondents are self-selecting.

How do you know what the sample size is?
Removed User 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

16 - 50 all basically ask the same 2 questions, gave up there.
 Brass Nipples 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Sorry survey wasn't sensational enough for me. I fell asleep at the keyboard...

1
 trouserburp 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Got to Q70 and gave up sorry. Too long and too many questions where I would tick both answers or neither answer (they're not opposites)

Surf boarding - is that like surfing?
1
 sheppy 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Done but as stated above by others some of the binary choice of answers were almost impossible to put a personal response to.
 toad 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

This looks very familiar. The craving thing gets done to death by students round here, but I assume the either/or questions are a standard set from some standard textbook?
 JEF 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:
I get fed up with people posting their degree surveys on here.
Especially when you register on this site solely for that purpose.
Post edited at 17:51
1
cb294 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Did it, but it just confirmed my theory that the majority of social "science" research is not very scientific at all...

Was the duplicate question a consistency check? If so, why the immediate repeat? Also, some of the either/or choices were rather weird, as I could have agreed with either statement.

CB
 johncook 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

This appears to be a copy of a survey I did on an American site a while ago, even down to using the words 'liquor', 'surf boarding' etc. instead of the many other options commonly used in the UK. Even some of the grammar is Americanised English.
It wasn't a well thought through survey then, and it still isn't!
 Jon Stewart 01 Jul 2016
In reply to cb294 and others:
I might be wrong, but I gather (having answered the same questions many times in precisely this context) that the questions are taken from tried and tested 'scales' which measure certain personality traits, e.g. sensation seeking, and not written by the researcher. One problem is these scales were knocked up a few decades ago and now seem quite dated (I was quite amused by "I would like to meet a homosexual person").

There must be some purpose to all the strange double negatives too - presumably to test consistency of responses. But all this stuff is part of the standard psychologist's toolbox, rather than the researcher's skill of questionnaire design.

To the OP:

Note that this research has been done many times before! Not sure if any published though, maybe all BSc/MSc projects? A problem I have with getting respondents from UKC is that you get people who fall into the Venn diagram space "climber" + "internet forum user and self-selecting research participant" with the second category possibly having as much influence on personality as the first? All the people who find it boring, who can't put up with the imperfections of the scales, etc drop out midway through the questionnaire, so when you started with skewed sample of the people who clicked on the link, you end with one which is very very skewed. Interviewing people at a climbing wall might be a better way to capture a more representative sample of climbers - but it's harder work!

Good luck anyhow.
Post edited at 21:14
Removed User 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

No I quickly lost the will to live, you've got to make it a bit more rewarding for those taking it.
cb294 01 Jul 2016
In reply to Jon Stewart:

Sure, and I don't blame the OP for asking these questions for his thesis (and if I have a few minutes I am happy to help a student collect their data).

However, I very much doubt the validity of this approach in general. What are the control populations? How do you calibrate your questionaire? Do you run it past a test population of known risk tolerance? Do you recalibrate it after a few years (cf. the party and homosexuality questions)?

I have a different idea of what constitutes a proper science!

CB
 Trangia 01 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Gave up at 52!

I am a mountain climber, how can I want to be something I already am?
 herbe_rouge 06 Jul 2016
In reply to cb294:

You're in good company

vimeo.com/118188988

 Fraser 06 Jul 2016
In reply to herbe_rouge:

Science's Rodney Dangerfield!
cb294 06 Jul 2016
In reply to herbe_rouge:

Thanks! Feynmann is always entertaining, even if you don´t agree with his views on some point or other!

CB
 GarethSL 06 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Swingers? Wtf

I'm all for the slutty types but asking me about swingers (with only two options) who I have probably never met is a bit pointless.

Also the option to choose more than one type of climbing would be better.
 MeMeMe 06 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

* I would like to make friends in some of the “far out” groups like artists or “punks” *

Surely this questionnaire has come through some kind of time warp from the 60s...
 hang_about 06 Jul 2016
New user - one message - survey designed to wind up people who respond to all the surveys put on here.
I call troll....

The multiple question stuff is used to test how 'robust' the answers are from an individual. If you give similar answers to related questions then they are trustworthy, if you bounce around then they are not.
 Dogwatch 06 Jul 2016
I started doing the survey but found it made me irritated, then depressed, then left me with an inexplicable craving for the excitement of really strong blue cheese. I fell asleep and dreamed of being chased by mice who were shouting something about "ethics". Or possibly "Essex". What can it all mean?

 Slarti B 07 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:
Completed. Though after first few questions I chose answers at random since I couldn't remember if I am wanting to go climbing have an urge to go climbing , whether it would make me feel good, depressed, etc etc.

And I would really love to meet a punk, where we can we find them nowadays?

Liked the (single) question about desire to jump out of an aircraft with or WITHOUT a parachute. Hardly makes any difference I suppose so not worth differentiating !

Seriously, is this a Masters standard of work? From the poor grammar etc I assume English is not hisher first language but even so the content seems poor.
Post edited at 01:01
menon.nikita16 10 Jul 2016
In reply to Slarti B:

Hi. English is my first language. The questions asked in these two questionnaires were not created by me. Its a standardised and reliable test that I have been asked to use by my supervisors who have made use of it before as well. They needed more data and so they asked me to be part of this research. Granted that some of the questions may seem a bit out there and not from this decade, I am just doing my job.
Thanks.
In reply to menon.nikita16:

I'm baffled as to how you'll be able to use this as the basis for a Master's level dissertation.
 John Ww 10 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

> Hi. English is my first language... Its a standardised and reliable test...

Obviously not of the use of the apostrophe

JW



 Mick Ward 10 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

> Granted that some of the questions may seem a bit out there and not from this decade, I am just doing my job.

Hmm...

Mick

 markAut 10 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Like the above, I completed the survey, but also found it somewhat irritating. At least however you managed to hang around to respond to some comments, which is more than some do.

I am generally happy to help out, but am getting a bit tired of the one sided nature if these things, I provide information for research about something that interests me, but never see the results. I'm of the opinion that supervisors should be made aware that if a link to the completed thesis isn't provided, the institution risks being publicly blocked from submitting further questions. I just don't know how this could be made to work in practice.
ceri 10 Jul 2016
In reply to markAut:

Some surveys have an option to provide an email address if you want a copy of the results. That seems reasonable to me.
menon.nikita16 11 Jul 2016
In reply to John Ww:

I asked for help in relation to my thesis and not my English.
I understand that you may want to criticise the questions. My supervisors can criticise my use of the apostrophe.
Thank you though!
4
menon.nikita16 11 Jul 2016
In reply to markAut:

Hi. I am not sure about a link to the completed thesis, but if you contact me via the email address provided to you in the information sheet and tell me what name you submitted your results under, I can give you your results.
Thank you for completing the survey.
2
 timjones 11 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

> Granted that some of the questions may seem a bit out there and not from this decade, I am just doing my job.

Your.job?

I thought that this was for a master's dissertation?

1
 John Ww 11 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

You're most welcome, always willing to help

JW
 timjones 11 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

Well I tried but gave up at question 27, due to the appallingly bad questions

You asked whether climbing now would make me feel less irritable, less depessed and less bored.

As a masters level student didn't it cross your mind to establish whether or not I felt bored, irritated or depressed before asking these questions?

Thanks to your questionnaire I am now both irritated and depressed by the poor quality of quaility of research that is being done in the UK.
 Mick Ward 11 Jul 2016
In reply to timjones:

Quick! Go climbing and see if you feel less...

Or maybe not.

Mick
 timjones 11 Jul 2016
In reply to Mick Ward:

> Quick! Go climbing and see if you feel less...

I'd love to but I've got 180 sheep lined up in the yard waiting to be shorn. I'll definitely be irritable and depressed if it rains before I've finished and it won't solely be down to the fact that it would decrease my chances of climbing later in the week

Shearing is a physicall activity and it'll make me feel good at the end of the day but I doubt it's "sensational" enough to satisfy the very limited scope of the survey.

> Or maybe not.

TBH I hadn't even considered whether or not I was irritable, depressed or bored before I started the survey. I wonder if academics are more prone to depression than those who have more physical jobs. Too much thinking is never a good thing IME
 ChrisH89 11 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

"I am just doing my job"

Yeah, master's level work needs a stronger justification than that.
 graeme jackson 11 Jul 2016
In reply to menon.nikita16:

I gave up when I read the title..
"Do rock climbers with high sensation seeking experience more craving?"

surely a masters student should be able to manipulate the English language in a way that actually makes sense.
 krikoman 11 Jul 2016
In reply to graeme jackson:

> I gave up when I read the title..

> "Do rock climbers with high sensation seeking experience more craving?"

> surely a masters student should be able to manipulate the English language in a way that actually makes sense.

Craving rock climbers with more sensation experience do high seeking.

Is that better?
 mountainbagger 11 Jul 2016
In reply to krikoman:

> Craving rock climbers with more sensation experience do high seeking.

> Is that better?

You are Yoda and I claim my £5.
 Tyler 11 Jul 2016
In reply to krikoman:
Well it's no worse
 Mick Ward 11 Jul 2016
In reply to timjones:

Hope the sheep sheering went OK. My mate Trev gave up climbing for sheep sheering - and he was good!

Mick
 krikoman 11 Jul 2016
In reply to mountainbagger:

> You are Yoda and I claim my £5.

In the post, it is!
Andy Gamisou 11 Jul 2016
In reply to graeme jackson:

> "Do rock climbers with high sensation seeking experience more craving?"

Only if they're K D Lang.
 johncook 11 Jul 2016
In reply to ceri:

Have often filled in my e-mail address, sometimes on UKC, where the option has been offered. I have never yet had a response, as for some of the better surveys the results would have been interesting. In this case I don't care!
 timjones 12 Jul 2016
In reply to Mick Ward:

> Hope the sheep sheering went OK. My mate Trev gave up climbing for sheep sheering - and he was good!

> Mick

The weather was.good, I was not quite so good so I have a few left to do today.

I don't think I'll be giving up climbing

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