Another furry survey --- links, thoughts
Dec. 18th, 2009 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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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 hopingeredien 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.
I did fill it out, and while I don't think it's nearly as problematic as some of the other surveys on such topics I've taken in the past, I'm not sure how interesting the results will be. Things like "How did joining the furry community change your life?" really seem like they need an hour interview, not two small before and after text boxes; I ended up writing a ton because I didn't want the narrative to be "I used to be sad but then I found furries and now I am happy!" Personally, I don't find that to be true in a meaningful way, and I don't think the question gave room for the intersections of furry and other identity markers or cultural groups to really be explained at all. All of the questions are either "yes/no" or free text entry fields, and I did like that. Also interesting: It didn't ask for gender, age, race, or other identifying markers at all. It really just wanted to know if you were a furry. I'm not skilled enough with this kind of data gathering to know if that's a good idea or a bad idea or what, but it was nice not to have to pick a gender out of two options again.
The things I found most interesting I actually think have very little to do with furry and much more to do with the evolution of social groups across the Internet. Furry is one of the groups out there with a lot of geographic spread and online socialization --- I think more and more groups are like that, but furry has arguably been at it longer than some of those groups, and so the social patterns there could be interesting. There were a bunch of questions about internet and in-person socialization, and the difference between them, and I found my own answers pretty interesting. Personally, I have a bunch of friends in different places, some of whom I've never met, but most of them I try to make a point of meeting, even if I'm going to interact with them primarily online; it real-personifies them for me and that's valuable. I know not everyone does this. I think collecting the different ways and reasons people do or don't do this would be interesting. I don't know if they're going to get that from this survey, but maybe it will make the question apparent to them or some other researcher. Or maybe there's tons on this already! If you know of any, please comment, I'm curious if nothing else. :)
I'm actually curious about how other people respond on this. I'm very lucky --- I have multiple very supportive social groups, and for the most part my answers to questions about support are just "Yup, I'm good. Yup, I'm happy. Yup, lots of friends." Do furry and other such geographically dispersed social groups offer resources to people who would otherwise have difficulty getting them in the places they live or from the people they spend in-person time with? Probably. And I think discussing and studying that --- furry as one example maybe, but not as the thing in itself --- has the potential to be really interesting and valuable.
Thoughts?
[0] Yes, they actually called it a furvey. Furchrissakes.
[1] I don't know why "benifited" reads as such a furry typo to me, but it does. Also my cite for this is http://uafurvey.org/question.html Also also, if that's the Eric Olson who I was able to find attached to UAlaska on Google, he has a usenet history. I didn't read it, because I don't care that much, but it at least suggests "not a fresh grad student, probably someone who's been attached to the university forever." But I haven't verified that it's the same person, because I have work to get to. ;)
[2] What she said about it made me nervous; from my recollected conversation, it seemed to her that they were looking to find a diagnosis parallel to gender identity disorder or something similar. That diagnosis itself makes me nervous --- Who are you calling disordered? --- but I'm torn about completely discarding it because it's actually afforded me and other people I can point to cheaper access to valuable medical resources. I'm not sure how that would help furries, unless insurance companies are going to start covering full-body leopard print tattoos or surface piercings for whisker mounts. Although there's totally a Blue Cross/Blue Shield Approved Fursuit! racket in here waiting to happen. Other people had other objections that I don't feel qualified to comment on. Wikifur also has articles on other furry surveys for people who really want to dig into this.
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.I did fill it out, and while I don't think it's nearly as problematic as some of the other surveys on such topics I've taken in the past, I'm not sure how interesting the results will be. Things like "How did joining the furry community change your life?" really seem like they need an hour interview, not two small before and after text boxes; I ended up writing a ton because I didn't want the narrative to be "I used to be sad but then I found furries and now I am happy!" Personally, I don't find that to be true in a meaningful way, and I don't think the question gave room for the intersections of furry and other identity markers or cultural groups to really be explained at all. All of the questions are either "yes/no" or free text entry fields, and I did like that. Also interesting: It didn't ask for gender, age, race, or other identifying markers at all. It really just wanted to know if you were a furry. I'm not skilled enough with this kind of data gathering to know if that's a good idea or a bad idea or what, but it was nice not to have to pick a gender out of two options again.
The things I found most interesting I actually think have very little to do with furry and much more to do with the evolution of social groups across the Internet. Furry is one of the groups out there with a lot of geographic spread and online socialization --- I think more and more groups are like that, but furry has arguably been at it longer than some of those groups, and so the social patterns there could be interesting. There were a bunch of questions about internet and in-person socialization, and the difference between them, and I found my own answers pretty interesting. Personally, I have a bunch of friends in different places, some of whom I've never met, but most of them I try to make a point of meeting, even if I'm going to interact with them primarily online; it real-personifies them for me and that's valuable. I know not everyone does this. I think collecting the different ways and reasons people do or don't do this would be interesting. I don't know if they're going to get that from this survey, but maybe it will make the question apparent to them or some other researcher. Or maybe there's tons on this already! If you know of any, please comment, I'm curious if nothing else. :)
I'm actually curious about how other people respond on this. I'm very lucky --- I have multiple very supportive social groups, and for the most part my answers to questions about support are just "Yup, I'm good. Yup, I'm happy. Yup, lots of friends." Do furry and other such geographically dispersed social groups offer resources to people who would otherwise have difficulty getting them in the places they live or from the people they spend in-person time with? Probably. And I think discussing and studying that --- furry as one example maybe, but not as the thing in itself --- has the potential to be really interesting and valuable.
Thoughts?
[0] Yes, they actually called it a furvey. Furchrissakes.
[1] I don't know why "benifited" reads as such a furry typo to me, but it does. Also my cite for this is http://uafurvey.org/question.html Also also, if that's the Eric Olson who I was able to find attached to UAlaska on Google, he has a usenet history. I didn't read it, because I don't care that much, but it at least suggests "not a fresh grad student, probably someone who's been attached to the university forever." But I haven't verified that it's the same person, because I have work to get to. ;)
[2] What she said about it made me nervous; from my recollected conversation, it seemed to her that they were looking to find a diagnosis parallel to gender identity disorder or something similar. That diagnosis itself makes me nervous --- Who are you calling disordered? --- but I'm torn about completely discarding it because it's actually afforded me and other people I can point to cheaper access to valuable medical resources. I'm not sure how that would help furries, unless insurance companies are going to start covering full-body leopard print tattoos or surface piercings for whisker mounts. Although there's totally a Blue Cross/Blue Shield Approved Fursuit! racket in here waiting to happen. Other people had other objections that I don't feel qualified to comment on. Wikifur also has articles on other furry surveys for people who really want to dig into this.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-18 06:58 pm (UTC)Yes, the scale for spectrum disorders has started being used for other sociability measures, because it turns out that divorced from its original context it's really good for that, one of the best tools people have to work on that sort of thing, and the data is widely recognized as meaningful. I think any connotations of medicalization in the wrong direction in that particular thing are because that's where the tool happened to originate, but I do worry a bit about the medicalization a la GID.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-19 04:12 pm (UTC)Here is the thing that worries me. Among the psych community, the three camps around GID are:
1) "GID" is a disorder manufactured by a culture trying to enforce gender roles on people. The person isn't the problem, the culture is, and so it is important to accept the person's own beliefs on their gender and help them do whatever they need to to live the life they want.
2) There is a medical problem, related to hormone levels etc, which leads to people having feelings/identity which do not fit their biological sex. Therefore, until/unless we can come up with some sort of medication to fix the identity problem, people should have surgery etc. to correct their bodies to better fit their innate, biological identity.
3) Some people have issues with their self-image and desires, related to their past experiences and relationships with important people (sometimes related to the overall culture's sexism), which manifest in discomfort with their gender identity. These people should be helped to overcome their feelings about their "natural" gender so they feel more comfortable with them.
So, like, I find the third of these very problematic, and the second a bit essentialist for my taste. (I'm not saying there might not be some people for whom they're true, but I don't like going in with them as a baseline assumption.) But at least around gender, there's enough politics for there to be a dialogue.
Around furrydom, there's less politics. And while I'd be fascinated to find a biochemical reason for it, I'm dubious. Which divides shrinks into the first or third camp, and I think most of the ones I know would jump for third. And I'm not sure I want to see "FID" used by such people as an argument about why they're right about "GID." Which they could do more easily, because I think (I could be wrong) that while the average person has more emotions about the gender binary, they are more objectively sure about the species binary. If that makes sense.
Though the arguments would be interesting...