5 very casual unscientific questions, all optional, on Google Forms, share the URL with and/or tag folks you think would be up for taking part, especially if you think they won’t have seen this!
I’ll put the results here when I feel like it. :)
Edit: I added a couple of questions so it’s 7 now.
Yeah, the spreadsheet of responses doesn’t contain email addresses or location or any other identifying information, so the only way I’d be able to tell who’s who is if I somehow could search for people who have exactly this number of IDs and observations, and it’d only work if no one observed or IDed anything until I had looked them up…! :)
I am also curious about the demographics of the curators and how many users are employed in (or retired from or students in) the natural sciences.
I feel very lucky to be employed in the field of my degree where I also get to use iNat at work.
I’ve had a looooong day and I am a sofablob right now, but I’ve done most of the spreadsheet setting up, so I’m hopeful that I might be able to get it done this evening! :)
I agree with @arboretum_amy, there is a tendency for women to respond to surveys at a higher rate. I am a social scientist, and mostly rely on surveys to collect data. I have heard from others that specifically younger men respond to surveys at lower rates. I’ve seen an age bias in my work, not necessarily gender, but I also research populations that are already heavily skewed towards men. After a quick search, I’ve only come up with one piece that identified a gender bias (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15100615). I’ll add that identifying and confirming a gender bias in survey response, that is not created by the survey objective or content, is very tricky to do. To do that, you would need to already know the gender distribution of the survey population beforehand. Most research projects using surveys will not have that detailed information.
Absolutely. My survey is very casual and non-scientific and I’m doing it entirely out of nosiness. :D The results write-up thing that I do will mention that it’s probably not super representative. Someone responding to the survey says that they know a bunch of women on iNat who don’t use the forums because they don’t like the vibe here, so maybe that’ll balance out. ;)