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WHY CERTAIN CHOICES WERE MADE The
following is a list of reasons and justifications for why I made certain
choices in the survey. It is also where I admit the many mistakes that I
made in the construction of the survey. These are elements of the survey
which are not likely to have affected the outcome of the data collected,
but are worth noting here all the same.
1. Statement of Consent Thank
you for taking part in the Furry Sociological Survey. I'm writing to let
you know that it appears that you have forgotten to read through the
Statement of Consent properly. Please, read through it again and send the
file to me again. You will understand why when you read through the
Statement of Consent more
closely. Thanks very much, Occasionally I wrote a slightly different response
if there was more to be said, but in the vast majority of cases, this was
the email sent out to those who forgot to mark consent.
2. Choice of forums All
forums selected were chosen because they had no specific focus other than
being a furry forum. Forums such as the Yiffstar forums were avoided, as
they focus on the adult side of furry. I go into a bit more detail on this
in the report itself.
3. ‘Other’ gender category I added in an ‘other’ category to the question regarding gender. which was missing from Rust’s original survey. While ‘other’ generally assumes the participant was a hermaphrodite, it may also include persons who have had a sex change. I used the term ‘other’ to be all inclusive of persons with genders which were neither clearly male nor female. I hope that no one took this choice to be derogatory of hermaphrodites, people who have had a sex change or any other types of people with less common genders.
7. Yearly income For the
question regarding yearly income, participants were expected to answer in
their own national currency. Afterwards, I would look at on what continent
they resided and convert their national currency into United
States dollars. Because the answer
options were divided into $10,000 integers, variations in currency values
within a continent would be negligible for the most part. That said, it
would have been far better to have either stated that participants should
answer in their own national currency, or let participants perform that
currency conversion themselves and answer in
8. Lack of furry specific
questions It would
have been interesting to ask questions closer to the heart of furries,
such as if participants wore fursuits, attended conventions, drew
anthropomorphic animals etc. But this study is more interested in
replicating Rust’s original study, which asked more ordinary questions
regarding age, occupation, race etc. This survey is a census on furries,
rather than a study on furry interests. That said, follow up studies would
benefit from including furry specific questions.
9. The people versus
fursonas Some
participants have told me that they behave differently as their fursona
than as they do in the real world. For example, a furry fan might be male
in real life, but have a female fursona. My response is that participants
should answer in relation to what they do and are in real life. The survey
is concerned more with the people themselves than their fursonas (if they
have a fursona). But once again, future studies may like to investigate
the disparity between the behaviour of furries in the real
world and in the online world.
10. Years in the fandom
11. No option for
asexuals I forgot
to include an option for asexuals in question 6. I believe asexual
participants generally marked “uncertain.”
12. Only for ages thirteen and
up The
reason that only furries over the age of thirteen were allowed to
participate is that younger participants would have to get the written
consent from their parents to participate. This is a requirement for an
ethical study. The problem with that would be parents finding out that
their eight year old son might be a few misspelled letters from ending up
at yiffstar.com when intending to visit yerf.com. Still, it would be
interesting to see just how many furries there are out there who are under
the age of thirteen. According to Osaki's findings, 1.8% of furries found
online are aged 10 to 14.
13. No maths? Originally, I had intended to subject the data to descriptive
statistics, which would require various mathematical calculations. This
did not end up happening due to my lack of mathematical education. My
first year of psychology had taught me how to interpret things such P
values, Standard Error of the mean and so on, but not how to calculate
them. It doesn’t matter, as you cannot really apply descriptive statistics
to nominal data anyway! 14. Manual tally Survey
responses were emailed in and all of these were tallied manually. This was
done for a number of reasons. First, it meant that I could confirm that
the statement on consent had been marked. Second, it meant that I could
contact people if they missed answering a question. Lastly – and most
importantly – I could contact people if there were any discrepancy in the
way questions had been answered. For example, if a participant had marked
they were a student, but later answered they were earning an annual salary
of forty to fifty thousand dollars, I could contact that person and check
if this was correct or a mistake. To ensure the manual tally was
completely correct, the results were tallied twice over. The first tally
was done as emails were received. The second tally was done some time
later going over the whole thing again. |