Wow o.o' I suppose I'll chime in a little bit here:
With regard to the question about being 100% or feeling less than 100% human: I'll state that none of the researchers has any opinion about people claiming to be one or the other. We do not believe any of the four "Types" of furries to be "right" or "wrong", or "true furries" or "less furry" based on their answers to two questions. We are also very well aware that furries are an incredibly diverse group and that a typology does not do justice to the full range of beliefs on the diverse subjects in the fandom. The typology is, for most intents and purposes, a way of getting a rough division of furries into four groups to ease the task of data analysis. A person can say what they want about how nice it would be to have nothing but open-ended questions and multiple dimensions, but until you've tried to run a set of multilevel models or multiple multiple regressions on a set of data this large and complicated, it's difficult to appreciate the need sometimes to create approximate groups like we've done here.
In the social sciences we deal with trends, aggregate data and imperfect correlations due to vastly multivariate problems. If we want to have any chance whatsoever of learning anything about people, whether furries or not, it is sometimes necessary to impose taxonomies or categories which may not necessarily exist. There is, however, some validity to our typology: most furries will concede that there are significant differences between furries which can roughly be approximated by something similar to our four categories: "the furries who are fans of some aspect of the fandom, but who do not actually believe in any spiritual/ therian/ other beliefs", and "the furries for whom furry is more than just something they are a fan of, it's a part of them, a way of life, a means of self-expression, etc...". And the ones in-between. Perhaps we could argue the details about the specific questions used or about whether we should be using a unidimensional, bidimensional, or multidimensional typology to model these approximate groups. But to simply say the questions are stupid or that categorizing furries is a waste of time or misguided is missing the point altogether.
We also recognize that the instruments we use to measure can be limiting or frustrating sometimes: anyone who's ever said "why do we have to pick yes or no?" or "why a 1 to 7 scale?" has experienced this frustration. Rest assured that we, as researchers, are well aware of these issues when we pick the measures. Unfortunately, there are no perfect measures. There is no perfect way to ask questions on the subjects we're looking for. Survey design is an art just as much as it is a science. It necessarily involves trade-offs: if we do more open-ended questions, it means that a) someone has to spend a month coding one question with 5,000+ responses (true story: see the species data), b) we could very well wind up with a big mess of data which is not able to be reasonably analyzed (which leads to unsatisfying answers to questions like "well, it depends who you ask" or "the answer varies"). So, yes, we do know that our questions, like all survey questions, do have flaws in them. We also hope to overcome these flaws through converging methodology: we ask the same question in different ways, or using different modalities, or at different times to different groups on different surveys. The flaws in any one question are compensated for in the strengths of other questions, and the hope is we can zero in on a true answer this way.
So, yes, sometimes there are questions that, many would say "are painfully subjective" or which seem "pointless and stupid". Oftentimes the intent of the question is not necessarily obvious, but rest assured: for every question that made it into the survey, there were dozens more that were cut from the survey in the interest of length. Nothing was added in as an afterthought or without good reason. Sometimes that reason may be more obvious than other times. Sometimes the reason turns out to be a bad one, or based on a faulty hypothesis. But that's what science is: a series of revised hypotheses. If we didn't have things that failed to work, we'd never learn from them.
So, in sum: we definitely appreciate all the feedback, and hopefully this has explained a little bit of the method to our madness. I affirm again that we go into this value-neutral (or, at least as much as is reasonably possible), and in none of our questions or analyses do we intend to make value judgments about what is "right" or "wrong" in the fandom. All we do is collect data, test hypotheses and try to inform furries and the scientific literature. =)
Wow o.o' I suppose I'll chime in a little bit here:
With regard to the question about being 100% or feeling less than 100% human: I'll state that none of the researchers has any opinion about people claiming to be one or the other. We do not believe any of the four "Types" of furries to be "right" or "wrong", or "true furries" or "less furry" based on their answers to two questions. We are also very well aware that furries are an incredibly diverse group and that a typology does not do justice to the full range of beliefs on the diverse subjects in the fandom. The typology is, for most intents and purposes, a way of getting a rough division of furries into four groups to ease the task of data analysis. A person can say what they want about how nice it would be to have nothing but open-ended questions and multiple dimensions, but until you've tried to run a set of multilevel models or multiple multiple regressions on a set of data this large and complicated, it's difficult to appreciate the need sometimes to create approximate groups like we've done here.
In the social sciences we deal with trends, aggregate data and imperfect correlations due to vastly multivariate problems. If we want to have any chance whatsoever of learning anything about people, whether furries or not, it is sometimes necessary to impose taxonomies or categories which may not necessarily exist. There is, however, some validity to our typology: most furries will concede that there are significant differences between furries which can roughly be approximated by something similar to our four categories: "the furries who are fans of some aspect of the fandom, but who do not actually believe in any spiritual/ therian/ other beliefs", and "the furries for whom furry is more than just something they are a fan of, it's a part of them, a way of life, a means of self-expression, etc...". And the ones in-between. Perhaps we could argue the details about the specific questions used or about whether we should be using a unidimensional, bidimensional, or multidimensional typology to model these approximate groups. But to simply say the questions are stupid or that categorizing furries is a waste of time or misguided is missing the point altogether.
We also recognize that the instruments we use to measure can be limiting or frustrating sometimes: anyone who's ever said "why do we have to pick yes or no?" or "why a 1 to 7 scale?" has experienced this frustration. Rest assured that we, as researchers, are well aware of these issues when we pick the measures. Unfortunately, there are no perfect measures. There is no perfect way to ask questions on the subjects we're looking for. Survey design is an art just as much as it is a science. It necessarily involves trade-offs: if we do more open-ended questions, it means that a) someone has to spend a month coding one question with 5,000+ responses (true story: see the species data), b) we could very well wind up with a big mess of data which is not able to be reasonably analyzed (which leads to unsatisfying answers to questions like "well, it depends who you ask" or "the answer varies"). So, yes, we do know that our questions, like all survey questions, do have flaws in them. We also hope to overcome these flaws through converging methodology: we ask the same question in different ways, or using different modalities, or at different times to different groups on different surveys. The flaws in any one question are compensated for in the strengths of other questions, and the hope is we can zero in on a true answer this way.
So, yes, sometimes there are questions that, many would say "are painfully subjective" or which seem "pointless and stupid". Oftentimes the intent of the question is not necessarily obvious, but rest assured: for every question that made it into the survey, there were dozens more that were cut from the survey in the interest of length. Nothing was added in as an afterthought or without good reason. Sometimes that reason may be more obvious than other times. Sometimes the reason turns out to be a bad one, or based on a faulty hypothesis. But that's what science is: a series of revised hypotheses. If we didn't have things that failed to work, we'd never learn from them.
So, in sum: we definitely appreciate all the feedback, and hopefully this has explained a little bit of the method to our madness. I affirm again that we go into this value-neutral (or, at least as much as is reasonably possible), and in none of our questions or analyses do we intend to make value judgments about what is "right" or "wrong" in the fandom. All we do is collect data, test hypotheses and try to inform furries and the scientific literature. =)