Talk:WMUK membership survey 2013/Survey draft

Demographics

Ok so in 2012 we asked questions about income, marital status, and children. What we were trying to do was get a sense of barriers to attend events or the circumstances of members households so we could be accommodating (offering a creche at a conference maybe!) However I'm not sure these questions are as useful as we hoped.

What are better questions to ask that cover important problems like:

• How affordable is attending events in terms of travel and fee costs?
• Do your household circumstances present a potential barrier to participation? i.e. young or single parenting, carer, student under age of 16 etc

I think we don't need to ask about people's relationship status - its not useful or necessary. It could be helpful to ask about their households, but again I'm fuzzy on why. Best not if we're not sure. Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Those are some really personal questions. If I was asked that in a survey from an organisation I was peripherally involved with, I wouldn't answer them, and I probably wouldn't respond to the survey at all. Do we really need to know if somebody is transgender, and if we do, do we really need to know what their gender was at birth? How does that help us? The same goes for sexual orientation, annual income, and relationship status. I can understand asking whether members are parents/carers, but do we really need to know how many children they have? There are also carers of disabled adults to consider. If there's something specific you want know - eg whether affordability is a barrier - why not ask that instead of making assumptions? Harry Mitchell (talk) 13:41, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Harry. I'll try and break it down a bit cos you've raised a few points;

• "Do we really need to know if somebody is transgender, and if we do, do we really need to know what their gender was at birth?" - This is following best practice guidelines about asking questions about gender identity. Basically asking 'Are you a 'man', 'woman' or 'other' is just not good enough (NOT that I'm saying that's what you're suggesting.) If you look at what I was talking about on the intro page and the draft blurb for the demographics section, the reason you might monitor gender identity is both to do with trying to monitor if our membership is broadly mirroring that of wider society, and if not are there things we need to think about in terms of outreach work or barriers to participation. I'm really hoping this kind of data will feed into what people bring back from the diversity conference for instance. So that's the 'why'
• "I wouldn't answer them, and I probably wouldn't respond to the survey at all." - yep that's definitely a risk. I have on my to do list to do some reading about how to develop/encourage ways organisations can encourage people to disclose this information because they can see the value it will create. Again, this will be anonymous, all the questions will be optional as well, and I hope if we can link the ones we DO ask to data that informs decisions that might demonstrate value to people.
• "If there's something specific you want know - eg whether affordability is a barrier - why not ask that instead of making assumptions?" It's not that simple. You get responder bias about how relatively well off people are, and you cant compare that to office of national statistics data about national or regional trends we can benchmark against. I would welcome suggestions for better questions, and I'd probably err on the side of not including questions than asking rubbish ones. I like asking about caring commitments rather than number of children per se for example.
• Thanks so much for feedback. If you can make suggestions for questions that would help me lots, or just come and review what I've worked on next week IF you get chance (I know you're busy :-)) Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 13:57, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Additional note - we should be asking about disability in this context too. Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:26, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Good points. As I think I commented, I copied the text for the demographics questions from the best practice page on meta (as I can't think of a reason to not follow best practice). As for what to ask, my thought was to draft lots of potential questions and then select the ones we want to ask from that list. Thryduulf (talk: local | en.wp | en.wikt) 22:03, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

The question order

Probably sucking eggs here.

General practice in such questions is to start with the most general questions and then move towards the specifics. This launches straight into questions that affect very small parts of the population. Should start with ethnicity, identified gender, age, etc and then work towards more specific things.

We rightly make sure that people realise such questions are optional. Jon Davies (WMUK) (talk) 10:48, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

The demographics questions will - in many cases - put people off straight away. They should be moved right to the end, I think. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:11, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Attendance at events

I've added a question to the draft about whether respondents have ever attended an event. I think it would be worthwhile to ask some more detailed questions about barriers to attendance (such as not knowing about events, no events in their area, being unavailable at weekends, etc) and whether addressing some of those might make them more inclined to come to an event. It might also be worth asking whether respondents have edited Wikipedia (and if no whether they'd like to) to see if we et any correlations to help make sense of the data. We could also ask how they first heard of WMUK, and it might be nice to ask for suggestions for future events - most of the responses might not be of much use, but we might get somebody who works for an organisation we want to partner with and is willing to act as a go-between for example. Harry Mitchell (talk) 14:04, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Good plan. We did this a bit last time but it over focused on meetups. I'll have a go at drafting some questions :D Katherine Bavage (WMUK) (talk) 14:09, 16 October 2013 (UTC)