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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-12-18 01:54 pm (UTC)One of the concerns I had was that it only had two (I believe just two) gender boxes, which was annoying. It had a slightly larger range of sexual orientation boxes but I had to write "genderqueer!" in large letters on the side, especially because the way I view my own sex and gender is complicated so intensely by my otherkin-ness that it would have felt like lying about something essential to leave it out. That--lack of useful gender ID boxes--was the main thing I talked to Dr. Gerbasi about and only briefly about the pathologizing aspect, which in retrospect--especially as "SID" is explicitly based on GID, another disorder with known troubling aspects--makes me leery of participating again.
She does have comments on the outdated gender modes of some of the scales she used in the research, but my philosophy is--instead of using outdated gender modes and complaining about their outdatedness, aren't there any new ones accepted by the psych community (maybe not, but that's a problem all on its own, and we can't expect all psych researchers to tackle all problems at once).
She explains some of her methodology and reservations about it here--if you read one of these links read this one as she encourages folks to ask questions about her metholody and explains she's a social psych person not a medical one.
It it also unclear what Dr. G's furry identity or lack thereof is. Apparently she got dressed up in a fox suit and played ball with little kids for Halloweeen this year (awww). I wonder if disclosing furry status skews a survey unacceptably?
The fact that a scale apparently used to study autisim spectrum disorders was used to measure the sociability of furries also struck an off note with me, but maybe someone who's more into psychology than I who reads here can comment on whether it's common to use such scales to measure sociability over a wide range of disparate groups as common measure of sociability or not. The researchers defended that decision as giving validity to their data in the eyes of the community of other researchers, and I recognize there has to be a common point of reference somewhere, but is the use of a particular scale or measure of sociability a point of reference in common use among psychologists and researchers as a whole? I need more data on that before I can make an informed opinion.
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Date: 2009-12-18 02:11 pm (UTC)I would consider this bad, on the whole, because it kills the ability to look at intersectionality in the survey. I mean, maybe furries of color, or older furries, or rural furries, or whomever, have different experiences of the furry community on the whole than whomever is considered the mainstream/dominant subgroup of the furry community, but if you don't know that they're members of those subgroups, the patterns of their experiences as subgroups will be erased.
It also makes it hard to ensure that you're getting a remotely representative sample, since you can't keep track of the demographics that you already have. You could end up with a sample consisting entirely of white middle/upper-middle-class urban furries between the ages of 20 and 35 who live in the Northeast or on the West Coast, and not have any way to realize that maybe something is wrong with this sample. They could try to counter this by making targeted efforts to get people in specific demographic groups to take the survey (e.g. by going to a convention aimed at furries of color and handing out copies), but they're still going to have trouble telling if they've succeeded.
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Date: 2009-12-18 03:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-12-18 03:28 pm (UTC)There's certain advantages to never meeting IRL. I've had amazing tinysex partners kinda stop working for me due to meeting them in the flesh. My current virtual inamorata makes rather a point of not talking much about hir RL, and at this point I'm fine with that - I do care about the person behind the text stream, I worry about a few things that make it through from behind the mask, but I don't want to risk ruining what is frankly totally fucking amazing ts.
potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
From:Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
From:Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
From:Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
From:Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
From:Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
From:Re: potential future employers reading this, go look at my CV instead, I don't care but you will
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Date: 2009-12-18 07:34 pm (UTC)I've generally had problems with subculture research in that frequently it either seems to be self-congratulatory (see: most scifi studies) or super-othering (bdsm studies tend towards this end). I would love to do work on gender, intersectionality and the subcultures I'm involved with, but it's not the sort of thing that fits neatly into existing realms of interest.
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Date: 2009-12-19 05:31 pm (UTC)Angry Birds Online
Date: 2011-12-03 05:15 pm (UTC)cv
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