Tuesday, March 24, 2009

A quick FYI

Russell Glasser at the Atheist Experience blog (and he has his own blogs: Kazim's Korner and Castles of Air) was kind enough to post my survey on the website so I could get a diverse range of atheist opinion and experiences with regard to coming out to their friends and loved ones. In his instant message to inform me that some in the Atheist Community of Austin had expressed reservation about the validity of an internet survey (which he was kind enough not to mention in the blog post, for fear that it might put a dampener on the number of responses I might have gotten). To this, I want to say that I am in 110 percent total agreement with him and the other members of the ACA he discussed this with. In no way can the results of this survey be taken as the least bit scientific. The goal of the survey is not to get results to publish, but to get results that will help me better understand the questions I need to ask, and to see if there are any assumptions I made that appear completely incorrect, or questions I need to ask but I left out. As far as I can tell, little to no research has been done on my specific topic, and because of that, I have no other studies and surveys to rely upon when constructing my survey. In most research projects, if I am unsure of what questions to ask or how to phrase them I would go look at the previous research done on the topic for guidance. I do not have that luxury. This is the primary purpose of the study, to uncover the questions that I need to ask, but would not have thought to ask without first asking people my original set of questions. Already, I have discovered a couple lines of interest I was not expecting, and have learned how to better phrase my questions. For that, I thank all of you who have taken the survey and commented in the box at the end about how to improve or better the study, and talked about what questions YOU would have asked had you been constructing the survey. I hope that you continue to visit this site, and comment on this blog, as one person already has, if you run across any information that might be interesting or useful with regards to Hell, religion and relationships, or if you think of other ways that I should be improving my survey.

I should also say that I am going to publish the results here because I thought it would be pretty crappy to make a bunch of people take a survey, and not give them a way to get the results and offer feedback on my interpretations.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Pilot Study to be conducted

Thank you for taking my survey! I will post the results of the survey at some point in May, so check back then if you want to see the results. After the survey period is finished on April 4th, I will try to publish at least once a week about the survey, or interesting findings, before publishing raw data and the full results at some point in May.