Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, I am about to start a science fair project based on human behaviour and how it is effected by the lunar cycle. I require 50 individuals to answer a small questionnaire every night for two months, via email. All information is private and, I promise, the questionnaire is short. I only have restricted access to the web, so cannot get people from social networking sites. No one has answered my post. So I have no participants. No one likes me at school, so I cannot depend on them for help. Will anyone please take part in my project?

When you posted here, what demographics were you looking for? Part of a study is that "I want 50 students K-12", "I want 50 old codgers", "I want 50 humans of any kind", or "I want 50 humans with two heads". If you only want school age students, that's important.

I can't offer you any K-12 students, but I can offer you two adults. My wife is a psychologist and knows well the difficulty you can have trying to find subjects for studies. She and I would be happy to participate if your demographic includes professional adults. The difficulty though, is since these forums are for public exchanges about projects and fairs, you'll see that people don't post email addresses here for personal contact. That's for your safety and privacy as well as for others. And since you're asking to work with human subjects, you'll need consent forms from us where you state (and we agree to) the conditions and let us know that we're free to leave the study voluntarily at any time, etc. Your teacher can help you with that.

So that aside, have you thought about setting up a survey on a site like Survey Monkey (or others)? That way, people here can answer your questions without your having to give out your email address. I'd also suggest that for the emailing you may need to do, you have your parents or teacher help you set up a temporary email account and look over your shoulder as you work on this.

Best of luck with the project, and ask any questions you need to.

Howard

Thank you for your advice Howard. No one had suggested these things yet. I have lots of work to do now and am feeling more positive about my progress.
My project should have a group of children as the volunteers, but that is not something that I could do online. So I changed it to adults. I wanted to have different groups, but have only found 9 people to help me and not enough that fit into a category. I think it is more important to have some subjects than none.
Thank you for your offer of participation. I will sort things out with an on line survey and be in contact soon.
Thank you.

A good way of handling the anonymity is to include a question which requires the respondent fill in a blank or a text box with some phrase, word or number that is unique to them. That way, you can see who answered the survey and identify the samples that have been done by the same person. Since the person taking the survey makes up the word/number/phrase, you don't know who they are. Also, the instructions should clearly state that this word/number/phrase doesn't identify them in any way. No names, address, phone numbers, etc. It should also be something that no one else is likely to use. I might choose, for example, the color of my bike and my shoe size: mustardYellow45

Out of curiosity, I tried looking at two of the survey sites that seem to be among the most popular free ones.

On Mister Poll, I put together http://www.misterpoll.com/polls/599984 in about 5 minutes. A Survey Monkey version is at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JL9F773 . In both cases, I started the survey with a *required* fill in the blank question where the phrase goes, followed by any number of questions. Both sites allow multiple choice, fill in the blank or other options.

Mister Poll doesn't timestamp the entries, so it's up to you to gather the data every day and figure out who's answered on each day and who hasn't. They allow you to download the answers as an Excel-compatible file which is incredibly handy. I'd suggest that you not list the poll in their directory. That way, no one will find it in a search and only those people you share the link with will know about it. You have to be 13 to create a poll here. Whether you are or not, I'd strongly recommend getting help with your survey from a parent or teacher.

Survey Monkey is free if you live with limitations. A free survey won't allow you to download the results in a spreadsheet, but it does timestamp the results. It will be a more difficult task to go through the responses one at a time, but at least the site keeps track of when the survey was answered. I don't know what the paid options look like since I created a free account and had never used this before.

Again, make sure you run your survey past a parent or teacher before posting it, and don't include any information that would identify you. Explain in the description what the survey is for, how you plan to use the data and that anyone is free to quit answering at any time. If you ask for anything personal, like "where do you live", "how old are you" and stuff like that - that's okay if it can't identify the respondent, but if it's optional, make that clear too.

Please write back if that's not clear or if you have any answered questions.

I'll share the results of the surveys I posted above if anyone cares, but I'll guess that the results will show that everyone agrees on the best science website.

Howard