Another furry survey --- links, thoughts

The always wonderful krinndnz  pointed me, over in her LJ (friends-locked, but a lot of you will find this link useful anyway), toward a University of Alaska survey about furries, or furvey. [0] There's rather a history of bad surveys and research done on minority populations, which often makes people nervous about this sort of thing. (A part of me hesitates to class furries as "a minority population" --- but in this circumstance, of researchers saying "Ooh, here are some different people I can go and research," I think it fits.) In recent cases that have a lot of Internet press, there's always that ridiculous slash brain sexuality study (as ceruleanst  points out over on Krinn's blog), and I also just read tagonist 's post about trans studies recently, and I also also still have PIlar Osario's work (thanks to this conference) about how race is not really a great category for medical studies sitting in the back of my head and percolating. So I approached this furvey with some trepidation, but decided I would go ahead, Google-stalk a little bit, and take a look at the survey itself.

Short, spoiler-free verdict: Actually I don't think it's that bad. One of the two researchers identifies or has identified as a furry (or I suppose is outright lying): "My name is Eric Olson, I am the data gnome and the person who suggested the study in the first place. I think the furry community, for all its weird little quirks is, on the whole, a pretty positive thing. I certainly benifited from it and I suspect quite a few other people have too." [1] That's not necessarily Objective (tm) but it makes me way more comfortable than other surveys have in the past. (I'm hoping eredien  will chime in here on the furry survey that was going around Anthrocon --- I didn't take it, but she did and she talked to the researchers for a while, too. [2]) Also, you're able to click submit, read all the questions, and decide if you want to participate or not; it's just one page (although if you answer "yes" to one question it pops up five text boxes that were invisible before). This is way better than that surveymonkey nonsense that makes you answer two things, click, answer two things... so if you were sitting on the fence about this, you might as well check it out.

( Potentially spoilery: My thoughts on the survey, what's bad, what's potentially valuable )