The Road to the Tildes 2020 Census: Pandemic Boogaloo Part 2: The Boogalooing
Note: If you think I'm going to make this title longer with each consecutive topic... You're god damn right.
Hello everyone. After the last topic I posted I garnered some feedback and adjusted the planned 2020 form accordingly. Updates include things like the gender text-box so really everyone is included no matter how diverse, unless your gender longer than maximum limit of JotForms text box fields.
You also have the option to enter your age by decile instead of a precise number. One user had a problem with this last year, so I added the option to make your age more general. As always, none of the fields are going to be mandatory!
I've also changed the political question to the political compass instead of the 8values quiz. I don't know if it's going to be any more precise, but at least it will allow us to create a better visual representation so the results are not going to be all text. Also, all hail r/politicalcompassmemes. There's also a text box to enter how you identify yourself if whatever movement you subscribe to has a name. It would be very interesting to correlate responses to the data from the compass and country, as political convictions are of course very relative, e.g. American leftwing = European rightwing.
Here's a picture of the form in it's current formI'm a literary genius
Another important update would be the following: There's been yearning in the last topic about releasing the data of the census so that fellow Tilderinosnosnos can create their own fancy graphics. I generally do not have a problem with that, and if it were released, it would be the aggregated responses to single questions. For an explanation, see this comment by @hungariantoast, you lovely person.
Releasing data in this form is not any different than creating graphs from it and releasing it this way, just in a more general, more easily machine-readable format. I think this is acceptable, and it would allow more opportunity for data visualization by the community, and as stated, I wouldn't be releasing more identifiable information this way.
If there are any concrete additions you'd like to see, like for example suggestions on how to make the title of the next topic even longer (that's the most important part), now's the time to bring 'em out.
Suggestion to move "personal political opinion label" above the political compass scoring. What you believe your standing is should be entered prior to completing the survey and being told what it is.
Good idea, will be implemented.
My only small issue is that I don't think the political compass is actually that useful of an assessment, but I'll probably take the survey regardless.
The problem is, is there a better alternative instead of letting people just straight up write it down in a freeform text box, which will then lead to it being basically impossible to aggregate and summarize in a reasonable time frame?
I don't have an answer, unfortunately.
I was hoping you had a solution, argh.
Sorry 😅 I don't think there's a good way of simplifying people's political preferences.
Nothing's ever simple, is it.
Unfortunately not.
Yeah, I just went through it and it was fairly obvious how your answers would influence things, except for one question where answers on one side of the scale could have been interpreted either way. It was this one:
If you disagree or strongly disagree, is it because you think mothers may not have careers, or is it because you don't think their first duty is to be homemakers?
I wasn't even coming at it from that angle, but that's a good point too.
Thanks for putting this together, Grzmot, and for letting everyone preview it beforehand. I think that's a good way to make sure everyone's happy with the format and we don't end up with a bunch of critiques after it goes live. As is, I like the simplicity of it! It's short, sweet, and to the point!
I know that Tildes is very privacy-aware so I understand the risk of adding more identifying information is that fewer people would take the survey, but here are a couple of areas that I think would make for interesting data:
I think those are definitely interesting questions, but I fear it might put off the privacy conscios folk of Tildes. Still definitely to be considered.
I'd prefer to see as many questions as possible, but then to make answering most/all questions optional, so people can choose what they want to answer. I think that way, we could gather as much meaningful information as possible while still preserving people's privacy preferences, and it's useful in the sense we can see how many folks would rather not answer a given question.
There's a balance to be made, because some people will see the length and simply decide to not participate as its too overwhelming.
All questions are optional, and always will be.
Could we make "None" an option for the operating system questions? I'd be interested to differentiate between "I don't own a smart phone" and people who just declined to answer the question (and maybe likewise for the youngins on the desktop side).
Good idea, will implement.
Sorting on highest education level is a little weird, I suggest the following:
Some highschool
highschool
associate
trade school
some college
bachelor
master
phd
other____
I agree. Including "or in progress" seems suboptimal to me as well, since most places I've ever seen a similar question ask for the highest completed level in the list. Encouraging people to answer the highest level they're working on might confound anyone who wants to compare the results to other datasets.
I'm not sure I follow your suggestion, these are the options on offer right now. Do you mean offering it in checkboxes (multiple can be selected) instead? I don't think that would give us more information, as very few people are going to be studying on uni without a highschool diploma.
It's more an issue of sorting (although I added some highschool which is not currently an option) - this order is closer to something akin to 'chronological' sorting, in that you can't complete highschool without at least some high school and you probably didn't get a bachelors before going to trade school either. There's some iffy-ness in that early section though because some individuals drop out of high school (or never attend) but do go to trade school, but it makes more sense in my head to be there than after all the other choices.
That's a US thing I think, no? For me here in Europe I complete the equivalent of high school and then have the necessary diploma to get to uni. Nevertheless, I have updated the question according to your sorting, I agree it's better that way, and thanks for clarifying.
The usual track is highschool > undergrad > grad
Where it gets tricky is when tradeschool and associates are thrown in. An associates is usually for people who don't want to (or are on the track to) complete a full bachelors, but some associates programs do not require a high school diploma to get into. For tradeschool, it's usually done after high school and instead of a university, but this isn't always true. It's possible to get a bachelor's (or higher) and then go to tradeschool later - you'd likely consider the bachelor's (or higher) as the 'highest' level of education you pursued, however, so it's placement has more to do with length of schooling than anything here.
Interesting. What's the difference between undergrad and grad? For us you do highschool, then you go straight to uni and depending on subject you're studying you'll have your Bachelors after generally 3 years (6 semesters, exceptions include Education, Pharmacy, Medicine of course) and usually nother 2 years for the Masters. How does that fit in? And the trade options just make it more complicated, fuck.
Undergrad and grad are typically a logical separation, not a physical one. That is to say, most schools offer both, although there are specialized schools for specific masters like MBA (business), MPH (public health) and so on. Bachelors take 4 years, masters can take 1-3 years after that depending on complexity (or longer if you part time it). PhD is usually 1-4 years on top of masters, not many more classes but the thesis can take a long time.
Then there are specialized universities such as medical school, law school, pharmacy school, and so on. These typically offer specialized PhD programs and are designed to be taken after getting a bachelors degree. For medicine in particular there's also a year of internship after becoming a doctor and specialization after medical school which can be 1-3 years at another institution plus another year or so of internship in that specialty.
Maybe you can offer more choices for individuals that didn't finish the most "standard" educational path. For instance, after high school, I finished one year of a trade school, followed by one year of an aborted bachelor's degree, followed by half a year of another abandoned bachelor's. Which means, ideally, I'd be able to check boxes for "finished high school", "finished trade school", "unfinished bachelor degree".
Maybe "current field of work" could be checkboxes instead of "choose one"?
English grammar and usage trivia: "aside from", "besides", "except for", "in addition to", "other than", "outside of". Here I would strongly prefer "other than" or "aside from". "Besides" is fine, "outside of" is informal but comfortable (explicitly making a metaphor of physical space). "In addition to" is weak because "addition" sets an expectation that everyone speaks another language. "Except for English" is weak because it strongly excludes English, instead of suggesting "I already know you speak English".
Thank you for your English trivia, I have updated the question to Other than English, what languages do you speak? But why are we whispering?
Because it was pedantic and also not my main suggestion. Besides, we have to make text a little quieter sometimes — eyes need rest too 👀.
Nice, l like you.
How about a "how did you find out about tiles?” question?
Good idea, will implement. Do you have ideas on what choices to offer, besides Reddit and Friends? I will of course offer a free form text field as well.
At least for the social media options, I would suggest including Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, and Mastodon, since those are where I see the most mentions of Tildes out in the wild. Though there have been a few mentions on 4Chan and Something Awful over the years too.
And Friend, Family, or Coworker, would probably sufficiently cover the offline mentions.
I like that you corrected the previous census prejudice against people older than 100 /joke
In all seriousness, I think that’s fine. You should run it.
ALL MUST BE INCLUDED.Except people who dislike oranges, fuck them
No seriously, they're cool and preferences are okay
Maybe a slight rephrasing of the religion question? I don't consider "Atheism" to be a religion, but the way the question is worded implies that it is.
How would you reword it? We went through this last year, as people took issue with the original wording then as well. The fact that Atheism is not a religion should be captured in the Are you religious, if yes, [...] part.
How about "Do you associate yourself with any of the following religious (non)beliefs?". This also seems like yet another candidate for multiple answers, since in my limited experience the answers "atheist" and "Buddhist" are not incompatible.
Maybe something along the lines of What is your religion? Instead of atheism, you could put the option down as No religion. It's the term that most official demographic forms I've filled out in the UK use, rather than the word atheist.
Mayhaps distinguish between allegiance to a set of (non)religious beliefs and the strength of said allegiance?
Do you align yourself with a set of (non)religious beliefs?
If so, how strongly do you align yourself with them?
"I think God exists, but I wouldn't die on that hill".
Can I fill it out yet?
Not yet, the idea if to garner a final round of feedback before releasing the census to the masses.
Very cool. :) Is it possible to duplicate a JotForm (without having to recreate it completely from scratch)? It would be cool to use this as a starting point for surveying other online communities and then compare the demographics between them.
I have published the form as a template, you can copy it for yourself, although only on JotForms.
I'd imagine pansexual might be a neat addition to the sexual orientation question kind of as opposition to asexual. A freeform asking for your placement on the kinsey might also be neat, although pretty controversial.
I'd also reccomend you add in the governmental (big vs small government) axis. This means you'd need to use Sapply instead of the political compass, but given the people who made The Political Compass Test made this chart of the 2020 US election, I'm kinda queasy on their test.
This would double the number of answers to 8 (the quadrants having progressive and conservative variants) like this, but that doesn't seem bad IMO.
IMO you could even add in all the center variants for a 3×3×3 cube like this, although that would be 27 options which is definitely a lot. (To be clear, this is very much the controversial/fringe/radical suggestion.)
If you're feeling pedantic, the free form on age has to be 0-117.
Asking which homepage sort people use (see these threads) seems pretty useful to get a good idea of how many people might see your comment if you post it on an old thread or how long we want to pay attention to an average thread.
(I'd also like you to elaborate on your thoughts on my platonic relationships and leisure time suggestion I left in my previous comment. I'm assuming you put the first one on the "still definitely to be considered." venue here?)
What makes you queasy about the chart they made on the US 2020. I know I don't have a full view as I come from an external viewpoint but none of that chart seems very wrong to me.
I mean, Jay Inslee as more right wing than Trump, and Tulsi Gabbard as more left libertarian than Bernie? Come on. Seems deeply suspect to me. If that wasn't manually made with an agenda, which I would suspect to be a "both sides, don't vote" agenda, then their test is crap. For the record, I would prefer sticking with 8values. Easily visualized with a set of histograms.
Ah, I was looking at it more in general terms as I know a fair few of the names but don't know the exact positions of each one. I'll have another look at 8values but I guess people won't be as keen about something less familiar as most people on here know the compass at a glance.
8values was used last time, but I don't recall if there were any complaints. The other thing about political compass is that it's very unnuanced even if you take the test at face value, because looking at someone's politics solely in terms of "how much government should there be" and "how much capitalism should there be" is quite reductive to say the least.
There also wasn't much discussion about it to be honest, which is partly the point of the census, to sketch out our demographics and discuss them. What's the use of a map of political convictions of the user base if no one is going to talk about it?
I don't think using political compass is going to prompt any discussion that 8values didn't, less if anything because it's going to tell us less about the political convictions of tildes users. I can tell you right now that using political compass, the results are going to be a cluster centered somewhere near the middle of the lower left quadrant, and that is going to surprise nobody.
Which I think is why there wasn't much discussion last time as well: relative to most communities, tildes is fairly politically homogeneous, with a compressed spectrum ranging from social democrats to communists and anarchists, centered in the left of the social democrat area, and this is pretty well understood by the kinds of frequent users who take and look at the results of these censuses, so there isn't much to talk about on that count compared to less obvious results like breakdowns of age, gender, race, etc. Incidentally, this is another reason why I think political compass is a bad choice anyway, as it seems pretty bad at distinguishing and sorting people of relatively similar beliefs.
I've exchanged the political compass for the Sapply compass. I mean it put me into progressive auth-left, I don't entirely understand what that means but it's not what I would've put myself in.
Good idea, I have added this question.
I think it's just hard to formulate questions like this in a way that everyone understands consistently. What is a friend to you? What are they to someone else? There's a realistic limit on the number of close friends you can have, but not everyone understands it this way.
As for the hobby, would you think a list is better, or a just a freeform option akin to What's your favourite way to pass your free time? I think the options are too diverse to create a realistic list here.
It means you dislike social hierarchies like racism and a lot of -isms really (progressive), economic hierarchies and inequality (leftist) and think the government is best for solving problems and in general should be used as a tool to shape society. (Authoritarian)
(This turned out bland as hell.)
Either way, I'm not sure how much can I comment in this without actually knowing your political views and test results. I Identify as a Social Democrat, Nordic model lover and Bernie/Warren supporter and it gave me progressive center-left so I'm happy with my results :P
That's fair. I'd say you might want to write in a definition ("someone who you keep contact with somewhat regularly for positive emotional reasons but do not want to live with or do anything more intimate than a hug" is my take), but anything like that's gonna be pretty vague and cause more argument.
Cambridge definition
Merriam-Webster definition
Urban Dictionary definitions (actually helpful lol)
Dictionary.com definition
A person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.
I agree that a free-form question is probably best and creating a list of hobbies is probably impossible. I said this here and its why I didn't mention that question in specific. (I admit that's not very intuitive.)
edit: Oh yeah and can you please use a color pallette for location data instead of whatever this was? Seriously, those colors give basically no feedback to you.
wait wait whoa whoa motherfuckin whoa
There are two other persons from Russia on Tildes?!
Who's the third one?
Maybe they don't have an account, 12 people that took the census anwered they didn't have one.
This makes me just a little bit sad. It's hard enough to find decent and interesting Russian people, nevermind those who speak enough English to look abroad.
haha nice, I had it the same way with my home country.
We can be tildes buddies. I find Russia to be an interesting part of the world. Maybe if we exchange more info we find out better similarities than that.
(I'm looking forward to the tildes census, thats why i frequent this thread from time to time)
Why the hell not?
What do you have in mind?
A question about mental illnesses might be interesting, since about a fifth of the population has one at any given time. The data might be hard to capture though, since some are periodic Like Bipolar PD, some are unpredictable like certain manifestations of depression, and others are continuous, like ADHD.
I think it's definitely interesting, but it might cross the line for a few folks privacy-wise, and you'd have the same problem of having to build a list of the most common forms of mental illnesses. And then you run into the problem of definitions. The lines are often blurry as to what is what, a lot of mental problems are professionally undiagnosed, and I wouldn't want people just guessing that they have something without a professional actually diagnosing them. I'm definitely thinking about it and other great suggestions people have made, just do note that I usually do this on the weekends, as I'm currently doing an internship as a software engineer (for the first time) and it's exhausting.
Interesting idea, although I'd like to (admittedly pretty pedantically) note that stuff like autism and ADHD are called developmental disorders instead of mental illnesses, probably because of continuity.
I don't think one precludes another, and in any case the literature uses both in different contexts. I've a book on my desk right now written by a pretty well published psych researcher, and DSM-V committee member who sees fit to use mental illness as well as developmental disability depending on the context. This also gels with documents I've received from clinicians.
In what world would Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren be considered right-wing politicians? You know there are actual neo-Nazis in the European Parliament?
I was going with general party line. Warren and Sanders are both outliers to that line.
I don't know how that supports your argument, it is despicable that there are, but I generally wouldn't consider the entire European right to be made out of nazis.
Nah, even the Democratic Party as a whole is still significantly left of most European parties on some topics. For example, look at immigration - there's no party at all on the German political perspective that even comes close to the mainstream Democratic consensus. If you look at other European countries, like Denmark, Hungary, or Italy, even the Republicans are nowhere close as anti-immigrant.
While LGB rights are strongly supported by both the Democratic Party and even some of Germany's right wing parties, T is much more contentious and a main beating point of the AfD. If you look at renewable power, both the Democrats and pretty much all parties in Germany are comfortable with it, but once nuclear power enters the picture, the Democratic Party is way more accepting than just about any party at all in Germany.
American leftwing = European rightwing is a gross oversimplification at the rest of times, and outright incorrect pretty often. The left/right spectrum varies with every country and society, and you really can't transfer a simple linear scale like that around meaningfully.
This is particularly interesting when it comes to young people in the US and Europe - The Atlantic explored this in a pretty interesting article.
Note that this a simplification:
The difference is that in most of Europe, one can vote for someone like Sanders or Warren in a national election. Generally speaking, you can't really do that in the US because of the two party system. Every vote outside of these two parties can be, in most cases, considered lost.
Yeah, but by the same token, you can't vote for a Marine LePen, a Sebatian Kurz, or a Victor Orban in American presidential elections (though Trump does kind of brush the line). The two party system heavily favors moderates and consensus building, but that applies to each end of the spectrum, not just the left.
It's a hemispheric difference. The international date line goes through the Atlantic and left and right swap across that boundary (Bermudian golf courses are a mecca for left-handed players)
But of course. My mistake!
Firefox' built in screen shot tool. You can access it by clicking on the 3 dots on the right side of the address bar.
There are extensions for browsers that allow one to take screenshots not just of the viewport (i.e. what is seen on the page within the window of your browser), but of the whole page (assuming it's scrollable).
Chrome also has this feature. Pop open the console, open the command palette (Ctrl+Shift+P), and select "Capture full size screenshot".
I generally don't read the comments that far down to see the serious hate-spewing, but I like my humour dark and edgy. But yes, there are trouble-makers found there occasionally. I like the differing opinions though, even if some of them are extreme.
Fixed link: How r/PoliticalCompassMemes has become Reddit's premier brigade, harassment and hate subreddit. (This is why you DO NOT hang out with Nazis!)
You put a
Tbefore thehttpswhich broke the markdown.