How Not to Do Research
As part of research for a forthcoming book Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain, by Drs. Ogi Ogas & Sai Gaddam (Dutton, 2010) an online survey was put up on LiveJournal at http://ogi-ogas.livejournal.com. In response to the general WTF-ness of online people, the survey rapidly got taken down, and the questions rewritten. (Surely the questionnaire needed piloting first - not to mention some basic research on the community being researched.) Generally I'm left with a sense that they weren't necessarily researching what they claimed they were researching - which allegedly was the male and female nature of parts of the brain as exposed by the reading of fan fiction. But then to them fanfiction is just a means to a dataset and they apparent don't care about the dataset.
I'm not even convinced by this sort of methodology when it follows its own rules of ethics, privacy, confidentiality and measurability.
The original questions are here: http://ljgeoff.livejournal.com/296228.html
The revised questions are here: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=7bc0aae6cc73c65707258ee67c679e4ae04e75f6e8ebb871
The original LJ site seems to be battened down. Ye gods. Not entirely surprising.
I'm not even convinced by this sort of methodology when it follows its own rules of ethics, privacy, confidentiality and measurability.
The original questions are here: http://ljgeoff.livejournal.com/296228.html
The revised questions are here: http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=7bc0aae6cc73c65707258ee67c679e4ae04e75f6e8ebb871
The original LJ site seems to be battened down. Ye gods. Not entirely surprising.