(Posted with permission from the Admins, thanks again TubaDiva)
I’m just finishing up a Masters in Occupational (Work/Industrial/Organisational/Business take yer pick) Psychology and I’m embarking on the behemoth that is my dissertation research project. Without prejudicing the data collection at all, my research area is work patterns and how they might be affected by technology. (You could probably guess the specifics as soon as you took a look at my questions!)
As part of my project I’m running an online survey and I’m hoping for the help of my wonderful fellow dopers. If you’re willing and happy to help out, my survey can be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ejd2010. I’m after as many responses as I can get, so please feel free to pass the link on to friends, colleagues, well-wishers, your glurge mailing list or whoever else you can think of.
The survey closes at the end of June, and if anyone’s curious I’d be happy to post the rationale and some details of my hypotheses after that. On the survey link you’ll also see a note of where the completed report will be published online in September if you’re interested.
In the interests of giving something back too, if anyone has any questions about Occ Psych, or what I’m doing, or anything else to make me feel I’ve worked for my supper, have at it!
I started to take the survey, but you haven’t included any selection criteria. It assumes that one is a person with a spouse and family. I’m divorced with no family. Am I excluded from the test?
jjimm No, not at all - sorry if it came across like that. The scales are standards from a couple of different places and the terminology is a little… ‘interesting’. I would read family in whatever way you choose, essentially it’s referring to ‘everything that’s not your work, however you choose to define THAT’. There are some biographical questions at the end, but they aren’t needed to select people in or out so they don’t have to be at the beginning.
I see on preview that you completed it anyway - thanks very much and sorry if you felt categorised out!
I should have said, by the way, that if anyone is completing this: none of the questions are mandatory so if you want to leave any out, feel free.
As a suggestion, I would formalise the above comments and put them on the intro page. (My credentials: I work for an occupational psychology company and sometimes design surveys for them!)
Autolycus, they hopefully have a plan for that. I answered despite being a grad student myself, and so my “work time” and “not work time” are particularly poorly defined. I tried to consider just time I felt I should be working on school as “work time”, but since I regularly bounce back and forth between two or three things while working, it got very sticky with some questions (others, though, made some sense).
Well, is it ironic that I was avoiding doing work by taking your survey?
I answered your questions as best as I could, however, I’m self-employed and work at home and my family helps me. So, amongst other things it’s hard to put a number on work hours versus non-work hours and dividing up the tasks respectively.
Huge hanks to all who have responded so far, it is very much appreciated. I don’t know who you are here but extra thanks as well to the people who have offered to do the follow up interviews, I’ll be replying to you separately by email.
Malleus, Incus, Stapes! it’s all good data - or at least it would be if half of those responses weren’t me testing the link again!
For everyone who mentioned they weren’t working, or couldn’t really distinguish their work and non-work time particularly - you’re actually helping more than you realise.
Geek Mecha I thoroughly recommend it if your thoughts ever stray that way again. It’s really interesting, and also I’ve always felt the branch of pscyhology where you’re least likely to have a conversation where someone says ‘Let me tell you about this awful thing that happened to me when I was a child…’
Due to some changes I made in my personal life, my interest has veered toward applied psychology. But when I first started, I was all about clinical psych. Then I heard that phrase, and I couldn’t run away fast enough.
I took your survey and it gave me an email to contact for follow-up questions, I must be special. I sent an email and I am happy to answer additional questions.
There are some assumptions which don’t necessarily hold: “work keeps me from sharing household activities”. No, what keeps me from sharing in hw is living alone!
I think there should have been N/A options. Sorry, but without them, I simply can not take part in the report.
The questions about working hours assume people work on hour-based contracts, and only allow you to enter a number. I have no idea how many hours I work in the average week: I know I’m at school from 7.30 till about 5.30 every weekday, but how many hours I work at home and at the weekend is a mystery to me. My contract also doesn’t state a whole number of hours.
I didn’t get that far, but I’ve had jobs where I worked a range of hours: I was weekend shift, so on a normal week with no mid-week call I’d work only 24h, on a normal week with mid-week call it would be 32h (which was the most common situation) and the worst we could work when covering a vacation period was 72h. Maybe it would be good to allow margins?
Yeah, we went back and forth on things like a N/A option and groupings for numbers of hours and so on. In the end it came down to a couple of things like the fact that I’m using (other people’s) standard scales, so can’t change the wording/options and still maintain their tested validity, and I have to be able to justiify any ranges I suggest and so on and so on. It’s been an interesting experience, all round.
Thanks for giving it a go everyone so far, and to all who felt that they couldn’t complete it for whatever reason - thanks for considering it and for your helpful comments. I do have to write 15000 words on this baby too, so lots of lovely ‘participants often commented about the lack of clarity over certain terminology’ will all be useful.
- or at least it would be if half of those responses weren’t me testing the link again!