We’re heading into a great year at The Border House with more posts from more authors than ever, a more focussed and detailed podcast, and a growing gaming community. However – we don’t actually know that much about our readers beyond what we can tell from Google Analytics and infer in the comments section!
If you have the time, please fill in our survey. It’s pretty short (took me about 5 minutes max to fill in), and will help us both guide future content, and make sure we’re being as representative as possible for our readership. There’s plenty of places to feed back on various areas, and as always email community@borderhouseblog.com with any questions, feedback or criticism.
We will publish some selected, anonymized results after this has run for a while. Everything is completely confidential and we won’t sell your data to anyone.
So without further ado…
Take part in the 2012 survey!
Survey All The Readers!
Any chance you could add a “1-5 months” option for the “I’ve been a Border House Reader for…” question? I’m not sure if I should choose under a mnth or six months.
I think the form data will be sad if I do that
Presuming a lot of these questions will be less than ideal, but will bear it in mind for next year!
Done, and done!
Here’s to 2012!
By the way everyone that “meme image” comes from the blog Hyperbole and A Half and was probably made into a meme without the permission of the blog owner.
I thought about this, but going from her blog comments she loves being cross posted/referenced (I am a huge fan). Could have asked, sure, but 90% of the images on here are stolen from Google Images anyway (am I allowed to say that? :O).
Survey filled.
Survey filled.
(How DO you guys keep the comments here so clean? I have never seen any sign of the sort of troll-attack that tends to happen with this sort of subject matter.)
Hehe I think being intimidating humourless academic feminists helps, obviously
Generally though it runs on getting X amount of comments approved and swift ban hammers. Most trolls only post once and then leave, there’s a great article about it here:
http://superopinionated.com/2011/02/08/here-is-a-project-troll-data-analysis/
It would be nice if trans and cis were their own category, instead of trans being smushed into the gender category. Trans is not a gender.
Also, I was surprised that there wasn’t even a general “action” category for the type of games you play, let alone more specific categories like platforming, shmups, racing, etc. Most of what I play doesn’t fit into any of the categories given.
*Puts academic hat on*
I’d disagree with this, and broadly speaking argue for gender being a continuum with Man and Woman at the ends, and trans* being general signifiers people use who are either in the middle, or on a different scale. To me, the cis/trans distinction is about sex, not gender – unless you’re arguing that cisman and transman are different genders, for instance, which is a whole other kettle of fish!
It is somewhat confusing as trans can refer to sex as well as gender though, however very hard to formulate a question that covers by far the most standard answers, without omitting anyone, or using language only a small pecentange used. I need to do a blog post about this, I actually went to a focus group with a dozen trans* identified people and talked about how to ask the gender question with government researchers for 2 hours… and came up with nothing.
The action category was an omission yes, will add it in next time we do it! Amazing how hard it is to be complete on things like this, can’t believe we missed something so obvious
What.
No, trans people are not all “on a different scale” or “in the middle”. Some trans people are those things, particularly cissexual transgender people, or transsexual people who would be transgender even if they were not transsexual, but there are plenty of transsexual people who are at the “Man” and “Woman” ends of the gender scale. I’m one of them.
Asking “are you trans*?” is not at all the same as asking “is your gender something other than the standard “woman” or “man”? The whole point of “trans*” is that it includes both transgender and transsexual. That’s why the asterisk is there. If I had known that you were using “trans*” to refer solely to gender, rather than including transsexual as the “trans*” label indicates, I wouldn’t have selected that checkbox.
And if you do consider trans/cis to be about sex, then that’s all the more reason to ask about it in a separate question (and call it transsexual/cissexual instead of continuing to conflate *gender and *sexual). Whether or not one’s gender identity matches their assigned sex is pretty damn significant in today’s society.
What would you suggest as options for a future survey?
Gender as one category, pretty much how it is now, but without “trans*” (“transgender” could be a valid option, but it should be clear that this is only for people who see their genders as being transgender, not people whose genders merely don’t match that which they were assigned). A separate category for whether or not one’s assigned gender and/or sex matches their actual gender and/or sex, with “trans*” and “cis*” or something similar for choices – I don’t know of a convenient name for this category, or exactly how it should be defined, but it’s something separate from gender itself.
I’ll consider it. But:
1) To me asking sex is sort of invasive in a way asking gender is not.
2) Most people won’t know the distinction, anyway, which runs the risk of a high level of answer error.
3) Gut feeling: I think the answers as they are will fit 95% of the respondents. If they don’t, that’s an issue yes and can be ironed out for next time.
4) The “other” box is pretty comprehensive!
A survey that happened in the UK asked a large group of homeless people if the gender identity they currently had was the same as the one they were assigned at birth. With that phrasing, something like 80% of the population ticked it as they didn’t understand the Q. There’s a point where no survey question is ideal, and asking more modern/academic questions will just give a high respondent error percentage.
Agree that trans could have been more specific (although it was starred as there’s plenty of gender related things that can be there on top of transgender) though. But I think this is overcomplicating matters, and at the end of the day the survey is to get general information about our readership, not several hundred essays on gender as a concept
Again though, give me a specific, bounded question and I’ll consider it for next time. Your “I don’t know” response was pretty much the start point to all these questions. It’s hard.
Would be good if there was a “none” option under religion. Atheism and agnosticism aren’t religion. I just used the “other” box though.
You can select none! But with hindsight, I think I’ll add a “none” box to everything next time even if it is redundant as the little star things are somewhat invisible.
Uh, there’s a BIG difference between “I have no religion” and “I am not answering this question”. You can’t just assume that everyone who skipped that question views themselves as having no religion.
I would request all the “choose only one” questions be turned into “tick as many as apply” questions instead next time. People can identify as both female/male *and* trans for example, or more than one race or religion or anything. If you insist on neat categories yourself you can always apply such a filter afterwards.
They *are* like that, with the exception of religion – I didn’t realise people could maintain more than one religion. They’re all checkboxes! *Is confused*
Ah.. oops? My mistake. I didn’t look back at the first page after completing the survey.
Sexuality isn’t multiple-choice though. I would’ve ticked both homosexual and asexual for example.
Not to mention that “radio buttons”, as used for sexuality and a few other topics, also can’t be erased once you push one. I couldn’t change my mind and decide that it wasn’t worth trying to answer the question.
[Ironic, given that the buttons on my stereo receiver can be pushed enough to un-set other buttons yet not enough to set the one you push.]
And regarding religion, I identify as atheist but have no problem deciding what I’d support if it existed. I’d proudly display a Shodan* fish, for instance, and my problem with the Pastafarians is that the existence of a “stripper factory” in their afterlife implies that sex workers can be mass-produced, which in turn strongly implies objectification.
*As in System Shock.
Sexuality isn’t multiple-choice? Hmm, if gender can be fluid and changing, why not sexuality? This is an honest question; I don’t identify that way, but I wonder if maybe others do.
I figure people aren’t heterosexual and homosexual, they’re bisexual, or something else (hence the box). At some point this is more about us getting general statistical data on the users, not accounting for every individual’s identity
The reason for the “other” boxes is exactly this, though. If any of the questions have poor response or a big % of “other” then we can make a better Q next time.
Thanks for putting this together, it will be interesting to see the results!
Minor nitpicks:
You might want to add a “Rather not say” option on the country question like with the gender one. As it is right now, there’s no way to not select a country.
I realize that there’s an “other” option, but you might want to replace “mental health issues” on the disabilities question with something like “psychological/neurological issues”. Not every mental disability is about “mental health” exactly. I’m having trouble coming up with the English to say it, but in a nut shell, some like depression are more clearly problems that need to be treated as suggested by the phrase “mental health issue”, while others are more permanent things that put you at a disadvantage in society, but “fixing” them would make you a different person and isn’t necessarily desirable.
On the religion question, “Buddism” should be “Buddhism”.
If I’m reading the intent of the question right, “My favorite three games of the past year” would be clearer as “My favorite three games released in the past year”.
The ethnicity section is a little too american, hispanic/latino, for example, is something that really only exists in the US(maybe in canada too, not sure), for obvious reasons, hispanic/latino(which are NOT the same thing) doesn’t exist in latin-america, it is such a broad term and it can include every “race” in the planet.
Would echo that; the list seemed to be a list of ethnicities prevalent in the US but doesn’t cover much for ethnicities in other countries. But it is a US website, which means it has a US focus and a blindspot elsewhere; its something I learned to live with pretty early on wrt the internet.
yes, it’s pretty common, but I do like to point our existence as non-americans in the internet (specially about metrical/imperial system), even if it’s usually useless.
Nathan got it right – the readership is something like 80% US according to Google Analytics, US + UK + Aus is something like 98%. Again though, feel free to suggest alternatives for next time.
So I’m alone in the internet again huh? It’s just that assuming that hispanic/latino are the same thing annoys me a little(I’m being picky, I know), it would be better if the option was only latino
The preferred genre question needs ‘action adventure’! Unless it meant to lump in action adventure games (Darksiders, God of War, Devil May Cry etc.) in with plain adventure (point and click games like Monkey Island).
Agree!
This was an oversight, and will be in next year’s survey