Re: [RCom-l] Expert Barrier Survey ready for launch

Hi WSC, thanks for the detailed feedback. Here's some background on what guided the design of the survey: Negatively phrased questions All the questions were compiled based on actual input we collected during the pilot. As outrageous as it may sound, editing Wikipedia as a potential threat to one's career is an actual reason some participants reported and we want to assess its importance as a potential barrier. If you google "tenure blogging" you will get an idea of how hot the debate has been around the question whether blogging is a risk or not for one's career (especially for non-tenured faculty). Something similar may happen (or may have happened in the past) for Wikipedia and we want to capture this i the survey. Starting the section with... The order of the questions in each block is randomised for each participant, so it was just bad luck :) Individual motivations vs shared perception This is the most delicate issue of the survey, for which we considered several alternate designs. We want to contrast the participants' perception of Wikipedia participation in general with one's individual motivation to contribute or not to contribute. The rationale for this is that we noticed that participants often can dissociate their judgment on statements they would endorse as members of a professional category ("editing Wikipedia does not count towards improving one's CV") from judgments on what represents an individual barrier to participation ("even if editing Wikipedia does not improve my CV, this is not a reason for me not to contribute"). Phrasing questions as regarding one's peers is a way to have a participant focus on shared perception as opposed to individual motivation. The reason why we put general questions upfront and individual-motivation questions at the end is that we believe the noise added by framing questions "from general to individual" is less important (for what we want to study) than if we ordered them "from individual to general". To address this properly we should randomise the order of the two blocks, not just the order of questions within each block, that's something I can look into. Dario On 7 Feb 2011, at 19:00, WereSpielChequers wrote: