Some of you have expressed concerns about the tango survey (relationship between one’s cultural identity and the values they see in tango).
This survey derived from questions which arose from my experience with tango dancers in various countries, on different continents. Although this is a study born out of my personal interest, as an experienced researcher (I have a MA and a PhD, and one of my research interest lies in the field of psycholinguistics), I have gone through all the expected protocols for this study, starting with literature review. I have decided on the methodology (methods of investigation, procedure, and analyses) after due consideration. The survey is an initial, exploratory study to determine whether the results are sufficiently promising to pursue a more intensive study. If the results of the survey are promising (I am happy to share the results with anyone who wishes to see them), I may consider doing this study as a university project, in which case I have to obtain an official ethics clearance, for example, to conduct email interviews (as mentioned at the end of the survey). I chose to be anonymous and used non-personal email to communicate, mainly because my personal email would reveal my occupation and institution, leading people to presume that this survey was one of the university research projects, which it is not. For reasons stated above, it would be inappropriate to host the survey on the servers at work. Public servers did not provide the necessary database facilities, so the bulk of the survey code is being hosted by a friend. Traffic diversion is not an aim. One participant (well, in the end, non-participant) expressed security concerns. The only aspect of the survey mechanism that may have triggered the reported security alert is that the survey mechanism uses a "cookie" to control the survey session. This is the intended purpose of cookies, which are no sort of security threat to anyone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie for a discussion of cookies, from which I quote: ---------- “Being simple pieces of text, cookies are not executable. They are neither spyware or viruses, although cookies from certain sites are detected by many anti-spyware products because they can allow users to be tracked when they visit various sites. Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, and the time frame to keep them, but rejecting cookies makes some websites unusable. For example, shopping carts or login systems implemented using cookies do not work if cookies are disabled.” --------- Another participant remarked "too many words the same". The words have been carefully chosen from an extensive literature review. Words that appear to be synonyms to one person may be significantly different to another. The survey is also in three languages, and synonyms in one language may not be so in another. The survey includes 100 words (which were selected from an initial pool of 178 words), as clearly stated at the beginning of the word test. -------- Please position the cursor and click once to indicate how much you think this word is important to your tango. Please make a judgement based on your intuition (without giving it a deep thought). You will see 100 words altogether, but the whole test should be completed within 10 min if you respond to each word within 6 seconds. ------- In order to further emphasise this, I have modified the text on the word-page to not only indicate that you are up to word-N but reiterating that it is "out of 100". For those who felt that it got boring, if this was due to the proximity of particular words, note that they are delivered in an order randomised for each participant. The optional inclusion of email address provides a means of direct delivery of survey results on completion of the research. The survey is not confined to members of tango-L, and hence publication of the results on tango-L is not sufficient. Some survey participants do not belong to this, or any such group, but still wish to be advised of results. I underline that email address is optional. Note also the assurance that addresses will not be divulged. I thank those tango-L listeros who have participated, and would be grateful if you would ask others to participate - particularly those of Japanese and Latin background, since they are currently under-represented. Questions and constructive suggestions are always welcome. However, as I cannot attend to this project as much as I would like to (I am doing this outside of my work), my responses may be delayed. Thank you. TR _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
