Just poked in on this site and noticed the convo! I'm Courtney "Nuka" Plante, the (furry) social psychology grad student on the project!
Sonious - I believe you are correct regarding the Patriot act and it's application in this case. Nonetheless, the information we mention about it was required to be put there by our ethics review board. They will hopefully update their policy at some point to reflect the change, but in the meantime, we do what ethics tells us to do.
Additionally, I can hopefully address your concerns regarding the usage of/ reporting of this survey: data collected are presented in aggregate/ summarized form (usually as the by-product of statistical analysis), and they are qualified as such - the data we are collecting will (hopefully) be used in published psychology journals, which will require that we state the source of our sample: in this case, a sampling of furs from every available online furry social group, website and e-mail list we were able to contact in North America. It is recognized that we were not able to contact everyone, though we maintain that this study will be one of the most representative ones we could reasonably conduct (and an improvement over previous surveys which were limited to conventions such as Anthrocon).
You're right as well that in putting the survey up online, we do let "anyone" take it in theory. However, we're banking on the fact that people won't willingly go out of their way to sabotage the survey. We also have additional measures in place to pick up on bogus data/ someone trying to screw up the survey, though if your concern is that "anyone who just calls themselves a furry can take the survey", then the answer is yet. We recognize that our definition of "furry" and inclusion in the fandom is relatively broad and includes anyone who calls themselves a furry, regardless of any other "credentials" they may (or may not) have to say so. Such is the nature of attempting to operationally define a term that almost everyone in the furry fandom will agree cannot be agreed upon by the fandom (I once heard a furry say that there are as many definitions for the term "furry" as there are furries).
If you have questions/ comments/ concerns about the survey, I'd be happy to hear them (feel free to e-mail me and I'd be happy to continue this discussion!)
Heya folks!
Just poked in on this site and noticed the convo! I'm Courtney "Nuka" Plante, the (furry) social psychology grad student on the project!
Sonious - I believe you are correct regarding the Patriot act and it's application in this case. Nonetheless, the information we mention about it was required to be put there by our ethics review board. They will hopefully update their policy at some point to reflect the change, but in the meantime, we do what ethics tells us to do.
Additionally, I can hopefully address your concerns regarding the usage of/ reporting of this survey: data collected are presented in aggregate/ summarized form (usually as the by-product of statistical analysis), and they are qualified as such - the data we are collecting will (hopefully) be used in published psychology journals, which will require that we state the source of our sample: in this case, a sampling of furs from every available online furry social group, website and e-mail list we were able to contact in North America. It is recognized that we were not able to contact everyone, though we maintain that this study will be one of the most representative ones we could reasonably conduct (and an improvement over previous surveys which were limited to conventions such as Anthrocon).
You're right as well that in putting the survey up online, we do let "anyone" take it in theory. However, we're banking on the fact that people won't willingly go out of their way to sabotage the survey. We also have additional measures in place to pick up on bogus data/ someone trying to screw up the survey, though if your concern is that "anyone who just calls themselves a furry can take the survey", then the answer is yet. We recognize that our definition of "furry" and inclusion in the fandom is relatively broad and includes anyone who calls themselves a furry, regardless of any other "credentials" they may (or may not) have to say so. Such is the nature of attempting to operationally define a term that almost everyone in the furry fandom will agree cannot be agreed upon by the fandom (I once heard a furry say that there are as many definitions for the term "furry" as there are furries).
If you have questions/ comments/ concerns about the survey, I'd be happy to hear them (feel free to e-mail me and I'd be happy to continue this discussion!)