throopw@dg_rtp.UUCP (Wayne Throop) (10/08/86)
> charlesd@tekig4.UUCP (Charles Davis) > (questionaire by Carmen Stukas, R.N., M.A) Is the first part of the questionaire in the referenced posting really state-of-the-art in sexual attitude surveys? This first part certainly has the "flavor" of being a "standard attitude survey". If it is a standard survey, then I'm disappointed in the current state of the art, in particular the phrasings of the questions. For example: > 12. A woman will only respect a man who will > lay down the law to her. Does this mean all women? Most women? Some women? A few women? Does it mean all the time? Often? Sometimes? Rarely? And just what is this "lay down the law" stuff? Does it involve physical coersion? Verbal abuse? "Friendly" persuasion only? Threats? Promises? What's the deal here? This could fairly easily be taken to mean anything from "some women respect honest men over dishonest men" to "all women respect only those men who physically abuse them", and quite a few tangential possibilities in between. I found (especially in the first part of the questionaire, dealing with "attitudes"), I could rarely understand what the statements were getting at, and thus (to put it mildly) had some difficulty in saying how much I "agreed" with them. I have been told in the past that such ambiguities and mushy meanings are irrelevant in degree-of-agreement surveys, because the various interpretations "cancel out", and anyhow, answer sets of "test populations" "correlate well" with other measures, so it must be measuring something like what was intended. Hogwash, I say. Just what does this mish-mash measure, anyhow? Does it measure sexual attitudes, or just measure what the respondents think the ambiguous questions mean? Is it any wonder I take survey results with a metric ton or so of salt? (Given the number of ambiguous surveys running around, this practice doesn't help my BP, I can tell you!) Don't others of you find this sort of survey intriguing, and would just love to participate, but can't make heads nor tails of the questions? Hmmmmm? -- "Mathematicians are a kind of Frenchmen. When you tell them something, they translate it into their own language, and right away it is something completely different." --- Goethe (Strangely enough, the above also applies to computer scientists.) -- Wayne Throop <the-known-world>!mcnc!rti-sel!dg_rtp!throopw
rob@dadla.UUCP (10/10/86)
In article <620@dg_rtp.UUCP> throopw@dg_rtp.UUCP (Wayne Throop) writes: >> charlesd@tekig4.UUCP (Charles Davis) >> (questionaire by Carmen Stukas, R.N., M.A) > >Just what does this mish-mash measure, anyhow? Does it measure sexual >attitudes, or just measure what the respondents think the ambiguous >questions mean? Obviously, it was meant to show that men are either domineering a**holes who use sex to get a feeling of power and control, or that men are submissive wimps, for which the primary purpose of sex is to please of your partner. Sorry, but I haven't got past the sex-is-the-ultimate-mutual-droud stage yet. Rob Vetter (503) 629-1044 [ihnp4, ucbvax, decvax, uw-beaver]!tektronix!dadla!rob