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)

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)