I started playing D&D around a year ago, and it was a blast. So much so, in fact, that I decided to spend my time, and commit my end-of-the-year statistics project to this marvelous game. To be specific, the topic is the correlation between the number of years that the person played D&D and some variables, for example the number of characters that the person created and some others. The survey was made on SurveyMonkey, so it is as transparent as a random survey in from the internet gets.
Demographic: anyone who ever played D&D.
There are 5 questions, none of which include personal information. The survey itself will literary take under a minute to finish, so please, humor me this once.
Link: No more link here, look lower.
Thank you for your time, kind stranger.
Edit:
Ok people, I admit, I messed up. The survey was indeed a fairly low-quality job, I had to edit it a few times AND now I have to pay $100 to the site to see more than 10 responses (I got much, much more than that). I am not paying, so I decided to redo the thing, with reflection on the feedback I got.
This time I created the thing in the google forms ( I turned off the email capture, so it is still completely anonymous). The options are now short-response type, however they are limited to reasonable numbers - you cant put more than 31 days a month, for example.
I do understand that I will get much, much less responses this time, but even a fraction will be good. If you already completed the survey, I would very, very appreciate if you will do it again. If you never did it before - now is your chance!
Completed your survey, but, if I may, I have some constructive criticism for you, from the perspective of someone who has done a fair deal of academic survey work.
1. Do not add editorial to your surveys; they look unprofessional and can introduce bias into the survey. For example, "without DM, of course" could have simply read "excluding DM"--it is not an "of course"--either with or without is a proper method of counting, you just need to clarify what method of counting you would prefer. Your fourth question's parentheticals are absolutely dismissive of certain players and absolutely should not be included.
2. Think before you write. Your fourth question is clearly born of lack of common sense, as evidenced by your parenthetical commentary. The reality is that a lot of players want to play less than once per week. I am assuming you are a high school student, so you might not have direct experience with the difficulties of the scheduling boss to adult campaigns, but if you thought about it, it is fairly obvious that large swaths of the D&D population simply cannot play once per week because they have jobs, children, other activities or obligations, etc. . Instead of being dismissive of those folks, you should have considered that they do in fact exist, and excluding them biases the survey. A better metric would have been to ask how many times per month individuals want to play.
3. Speaking of, "prefer to" is a pretty bad metric in and of itself. Someone could "prefer to" play every day, but only be able to play once per week. Rather than just ask the subjective, which is not a useful statistical point in and of itself, it would have been better to have a "want to" question alongside a "what do you actually do" question.
4. Proofread your survey before publishing it. Grammatical flaws can turn folks off of a survey and/or produce bias in results.
The survey is already partially biased by excluding specific answers "late" in the questions.
If you want to exclude a specific population (like me, playing less then once a month due to our jobs, but if we play, then we play for 8h), you need to do that up front or in the first questions.
As an anecdote, I actually debated not submitting my answers. Surveys shouldn't be offering opinions, and certainly not criticisms of choices.
I'm wondering if that was a hidden objective - to see how likely people are to be affected by the commentary.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I got a rather high level of criticism (posted the link on Reddit, so it was expected), so the deepness if your analysis is both surprising and very welcome. Sadly, while I can not change the options at this stage, since there are 190 answers and editing them will mess up the survey even more, I will remember these points, if I will decide to make something like that in the future. Thank you
Seems to be a very limited sample of information for a broad field of possible variables. For example, I put 7 for times I play a month because that was the highest number available; I play in two weekly games which is typically 8 times a month. Also as Voras mentioned, play time is also a pertinent statistic as some games regularly feature only two hour sessions weekly and others might only meet once a month but literally go all day. No statistics instructor is going to consider that survey enough to draw meaningful conclusions with any significant degree of specificity.
Sadly, while I can not change the options at this stage, since there are 190 answers and editing them will mess up the survey even more, I will remember these points, if I will decide to make something like that in the future. Thank you
Yet, and I checked after reading the above post, you did go ahead and change your options. The question that was once weekly is now monthly, which is a HUGE change, rendering all your prior 190 responses completely moot.
I suspect this change was made because the validity underlying data is not important to your grade, while the quality of the questions themselves is - which I understand is a bit of a cynical analysis, but I cannot fathom any other reason why you would acknowledge the survey should not be changed at this point… while going ahead and changing it anyway.
I know I and others were curious what the final data might be - and you indicated that you would post slides with the data when done - but, given the clear breach in basic survey protocols, I would recommend against posting any data from this survey, be it here, Reddit, or anywhere else. I personally feel that, when you know your data is irrevocably biased as it is here, you have an ethical obligation to prevent dissemination of the extremely misleading and skewed data.
Looks like you made a mistake writing this one as well. Your “excluding DM” note should be a parenthetical to question 3, not question 2. It almost makes sense in question 2 - insofar as it might mean “excluding characters created for DMing” - but that was not where it was included in your prior survey, so presumably this was an error.
Edit:
Ok people, I admit, I messed up. The survey was indeed a fairly low-quality job, I had to edit it a few times AND now I have to pay $100 to the site to see more than 10 responses (I got much, much more than that). I am not paying, so I decided to redo the thing, with reflection on the feedback I got.
This time I created the thing in the google forms ( I turned off the email capture, so it is still completely anonymous). The options are now short-response type, however they are limited to reasonable numbers - you cant put more than 31 days a month, for example.
I do understand that I will get much, much less responses this time, but even a fraction will be good. If you already completed the survey, I would very, very appreciate if you will do it again. If you never did it before - now is your chance!
Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf0h5qDkHSFCVtLplSyqvm6ESiNSxR4PJGWuafekKcrd2XVDA/viewform?usp=sf_link
Done. Perhaps the results will be posted when the project is completed?
In case that there will be at least someone to fill out the survey, than I will post the google slides link in this thread))
Completed your survey, but, if I may, I have some constructive criticism for you, from the perspective of someone who has done a fair deal of academic survey work.
1. Do not add editorial to your surveys; they look unprofessional and can introduce bias into the survey. For example, "without DM, of course" could have simply read "excluding DM"--it is not an "of course"--either with or without is a proper method of counting, you just need to clarify what method of counting you would prefer. Your fourth question's parentheticals are absolutely dismissive of certain players and absolutely should not be included.
2. Think before you write. Your fourth question is clearly born of lack of common sense, as evidenced by your parenthetical commentary. The reality is that a lot of players want to play less than once per week. I am assuming you are a high school student, so you might not have direct experience with the difficulties of the scheduling boss to adult campaigns, but if you thought about it, it is fairly obvious that large swaths of the D&D population simply cannot play once per week because they have jobs, children, other activities or obligations, etc. . Instead of being dismissive of those folks, you should have considered that they do in fact exist, and excluding them biases the survey. A better metric would have been to ask how many times per month individuals want to play.
3. Speaking of, "prefer to" is a pretty bad metric in and of itself. Someone could "prefer to" play every day, but only be able to play once per week. Rather than just ask the subjective, which is not a useful statistical point in and of itself, it would have been better to have a "want to" question alongside a "what do you actually do" question.
4. Proofread your survey before publishing it. Grammatical flaws can turn folks off of a survey and/or produce bias in results.
Yep, I agree with Caerwyn.
The survey is already partially biased by excluding specific answers "late" in the questions.
If you want to exclude a specific population (like me, playing less then once a month due to our jobs, but if we play, then we play for 8h), you need to do that up front or in the first questions.
Agreed.
As an anecdote, I actually debated not submitting my answers. Surveys shouldn't be offering opinions, and certainly not criticisms of choices.
I'm wondering if that was a hidden objective - to see how likely people are to be affected by the commentary.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I got a rather high level of criticism (posted the link on Reddit, so it was expected), so the deepness if your analysis is both surprising and very welcome. Sadly, while I can not change the options at this stage, since there are 190 answers and editing them will mess up the survey even more, I will remember these points, if I will decide to make something like that in the future. Thank you
Seems to be a very limited sample of information for a broad field of possible variables. For example, I put 7 for times I play a month because that was the highest number available; I play in two weekly games which is typically 8 times a month. Also as Voras mentioned, play time is also a pertinent statistic as some games regularly feature only two hour sessions weekly and others might only meet once a month but literally go all day. No statistics instructor is going to consider that survey enough to draw meaningful conclusions with any significant degree of specificity.
Yet, and I checked after reading the above post, you did go ahead and change your options. The question that was once weekly is now monthly, which is a HUGE change, rendering all your prior 190 responses completely moot.
I suspect this change was made because the validity underlying data is not important to your grade, while the quality of the questions themselves is - which I understand is a bit of a cynical analysis, but I cannot fathom any other reason why you would acknowledge the survey should not be changed at this point… while going ahead and changing it anyway.
I know I and others were curious what the final data might be - and you indicated that you would post slides with the data when done - but, given the clear breach in basic survey protocols, I would recommend against posting any data from this survey, be it here, Reddit, or anywhere else. I personally feel that, when you know your data is irrevocably biased as it is here, you have an ethical obligation to prevent dissemination of the extremely misleading and skewed data.
Looks like you made a mistake writing this one as well. Your “excluding DM” note should be a parenthetical to question 3, not question 2. It almost makes sense in question 2 - insofar as it might mean “excluding characters created for DMing” - but that was not where it was included in your prior survey, so presumably this was an error.