Ball State students can always count on receiving email surveys from graduate students, but many might not realize how important their responses are to researchers.
It can be fun to take a few surveys — after all, not many people want to know about personal things like Netflix usage.
However, as more arrive in, it can seem like it’s not worth it to spend time taking them. Though some have a drawing for a gift certificate linked with them, there may not be any payback for other surveys.
First-year general social psychology master's students Courtney Dress and Joshua Smith are currently running an email survey regarding relationship dynamics and motivations of relationships across sexual orientations.
Dress and Smith explained why they run surveys, how they use students' responses and what respondents can get out of answering the survey.
- Conception: Graduate students need to have experience in research. Dress said they are conducting their survey to show potential PhD programs they can study minority groups — in this case, sexual minorities like gay and asexual people. “You’ve probably seen in surveys and stuff, it’s like the choices are like heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual and they act like those are the only three choices, you know?” Dress said. “But it’s like, there’s asexual, there’s pansexual, they’re just totally ignored. … These people are out there and no one’s studying them.”
- Posting: Dress and Smith sent out a link to their survey to all Ball State students via email, but have also posted in other places and have received results from around the world. Because this particular study relies solely on the results collected from the survey, it is especially important for there to be a large and diverse response. So far, they have received around 600 responses, roughly 250 from Ball State students and 350 from other websites, most of those from Tumblr. “We definitely have a good amount of asexuals, like over 200,” Dress said. “We actually have a lot more women than men.”
- Publishing: This survey will be taken down in about a month. At that time, Dress and Smith will analyze their results and, if they have gotten enough responses representing sexual, ethnic and gender diversity well enough, they will publish. For this particular study, it will most likely be published in a sex research journal or a psychology journal.
- Reward: At the end of this survey, the participant can submit their email in a separate survey for a chance to receive one of two $25 Amazon gift cards. “I think that’s the only thing we’ve had to pay for,” Dress said. “If it were more, we’d probably try to get a grant.” So far, most participants have entered the drawing for the gift cards. However, because the survey is available around the world, it is possible nobody from Ball State could win a gift card.
- Follow-up: After publication, Dress and Smith hope to investigate the area of sexual minorities further with additional studies based off of their results.
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