NANCY wrote: > Your link leads to an Adult Content Warning and requires a > registration and password. Why not just send your opinion directly to > the list? > > Nancy > > --- On *Sun, 2/28/10, Myk Dowling /<[email protected]>/* wrote: > > Well, the first results from this survey are now out: > http://home.exetel.com.au/bodypaint/tangoresearch.html > > And here's my thoughts on the results so far: > http://politas.livejournal.com/197788.html > Ah, yes. I forgot about Livejournal's silly adult rating system. I occasionally discuss adult topics on my journal, so the whole thing requires that click-through. You shouldn't need a username/password, though. Anyway, here's the meat of the post:
There is some interesting points in this data. First off, we see that participants from Argentina are only the fourth most numerous, after the USA, Japan and Australia. I would expect that this is mostly due to the methods used to advertise the study and the fact that it was an Internet survey, so the distribution is more affected by relative usage of the Internet between countries than numbers of actual tango dancers. It is interesting to see some countries that are quite low on the distribution. The UK has Internet usage as high as Australia if not higher, yet had five times less participants than Australia. So it would seem that tango is far less popular in the UK than Australia. The gender split is entirely unsurprising, and reflects my anecdotal experience of relative numbers. The age graph is interesting. I wouldn't have expected the 31-40 segment to be quite so high, which I consider a good sign. The occupation graph particularly caught my attention, mostly because there seems to be a fairly definite divide between artistic/social occupations versus mathematical/technical ones. Information Technology is an outlier in that split, but there are two confounding factors there. First, and I suspect most important, any Internet survey advertised largely through email lists and forums is going to get more IT-focussed people. IT people are just more likely to be using such communication methods. Secondly, IT is a surprisingly diverse field which includes both creative and mechanistic specialities, so you get a lot of creative people in IT. In any case, the former factor is likely to be of much greater impact. Also interesting is how few participants chose the "looking for a partner/lover/friends" options, compared to the "love of tango/dancing/music" options, but again, that may be selection bias. People who do tango only to meet someone new are less likely to be using Internet discussion media focussed on discussing tango and helping each other improve. Unfortunately, the total numbers of participants is pretty low. I'd like to see more detailed analysis of the data, comparing the results of different questions. The second page of "responses to tango-related words" seems entirely purposeless and random. Perhaps they can tease out some significant results if they cross-analyse that stuff with the grouping questions, but I doubt there's much to be gained there. If they get some really significant differences it could be interesting, but I expect it'll be fairly uniform across groups. _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
