Where to post a request to fill out a survey?

March 9, 2009 11:35 PM

If I want to ask MeFites for help on a friend's survey for her dissertation, where is the proper place to post it, if anywhere is the proper place to post it?
posted by k8t to etiquette/policy at 11:35 PM (55 comments total)

perhaps under projects?
she could host the survey on surveymonkey or some similar site and link to it.
posted by special-k at 11:40 PM on March 9

It is up on the web. Will post to projects tomorrow when on computer tomorrow as long as no major objections appear in this thread.
posted by k8t at 11:44 PM on March 9

I have a major objection to eggplant.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:07 AM on March 10

I have a major objection to people using "tomorrow" twice in the same sentence.
posted by dg at 1:41 AM on March 10

"Tomorrow, tomorrow! I love you, tomorrow! You're only a day away!"
posted by Pronoiac at 2:12 AM on March 10

You'll probably have to buy her a mefi account and she'll have to post it herself..
posted by By The Grace of God at 2:27 AM on March 10

I'm going to have to support Brandon, here. See also: most vegetables, except cheese puffs.
posted by maxwelton at 4:00 AM on March 10

i agree with brandon. aubergine is a much classier sounding word.
posted by UbuRoivas at 4:17 AM on March 10

Could we have more tomorrows please?
posted by JtJ at 4:39 AM on March 10

I love olives - always have

When I was about 6 or 7 my cunt of a father father gave me a eggplant and told me it was a giant olive. I bit greedily into it and from that day forward he was dead to me. Gave me pocket money and lent me his car, but dead to me.
posted by mattoxic at 5:06 AM on March 10 [3 favorites]

an olive the size of an aubergine...*homerdrool*
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:11 AM on March 10

mattoxic, when my sister was about ten our father handed her a huge tablespoonful of lard and told her it was Greek yogurt. I think she's forgiven him.
posted by hippugeek at 5:39 AM on March 10

If I want a million dollars, where is the proper place to post my request?
posted by DU at 5:53 AM on March 10

Oh dear. I have to confess that when I was about 8 and my baby brother was 4 I told him to close his eyes and I would give him a big surprise. I fed him a spoonful of Tabasco sauce. Tears and spankings ensued. About a week later I did it again. He was such a trusting little boy.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 6:23 AM on March 10

I fed him a spoonful of Tabasco sauce.

When I was 5, my older sister asked me too look close at the back of her swimsuit to see if there was a hole in the fabric. Then she deliberately farted in my face and cackled in the evil way that only 10 year old girls can. I never trusted her again, however.
posted by Burhanistan at 6:40 AM on March 10

When I was 11 and I was at basketball camp, I went to the bathroom during lunch, and while I was gone, the guys took the patty out of my hamburger and replaced it with a brownie flattened to look like a hamburger.

It was delicious.
posted by SpiffyRob at 7:09 AM on March 10 [3 favorites]

It's not TWO tomorrows I object to, it's an EVEN NUMBER of tomorrows. Unfortunately zero is an even number, so I object to any sentence without the word tomorrow in it also. That's why both the song "Tomorrow", and this sentence are OK, while sentences that have two tomorrows, (or zero tomorrows) are not.

99 tomorrows would work, too.
posted by dirtdirt at 7:54 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Unfortunately, there isn't really a good place for it anywhere. Some members have posted them in MetaTalk (usually deleted), some have tried Jobs (not really a job at all), and some have tried Projects (but since it is incomplete, there's usually nothing to show off except the plea for surveys). There really isn't a good place for it on MeFi.

I'm not sure that's a bad thing really, when you consider that most universities have a pretty rigorous set of test subject criteria and ethics (and stuff like IRB to oversee it) -- I'm not sure a bunch of random people on the internet are going to give good data that you'd get from a more controlled environment like a university campus (and with its appropriate oversight).
posted by mathowie at 8:04 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Agree with mathowie, there really isn't a place for this on MeFi.
posted by jessamyn at 8:05 AM on March 10

When I was seventeen, I drank a very good beer. I drank a very good beer that I purchased with a fake ID. My name was Brian McGee. I stayed up listening to Queen when I was seventeen.
posted by owtytrof at 8:28 AM on March 10

When I was about 6 or 7, my sister took me to her friends house, where there was a plate of what she called miniature fried chicken and encouraged me to eat some. Only after I treated myself to a couple of pieces, to much laughter, I was told that it was really squirrel that the friend's dad shot in the back yard.

It was delicious.
posted by slogger at 8:45 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:47 AM on March 10

I love olives too. When I was ten I ate some salad and some spaghetti and later I felt quite ill and I vomited a whole black olive. That's how much I love olives. Too much to crush them with my teeth, apparently.
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 9:39 AM on March 10

When I was little I filled a cup with soy sauce for a long-forgotten experiment, but soon abandoned the project and the cup to go watch The Friendly Giant or Three's Company or something. Unfortunately I neglected to put the soy sauce back in the bottle, so when my sister came along and found a drinking cup filled with brown liquid she mistook it for flat Pepsi and took a big chug.

Served her right for stealing what she thought was my beverage, as well as for interfering with SCIENCE!!!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:45 AM on March 10

"When I was 11 and I was at basketball camp, I went to the bathroom during lunch, and while I was gone, the guys took the patty out of my hamburger and replaced it with a brownie flattened to look like a hamburger."

When I was about that age, I was at a two-story McDonalds and my then-pal Tom Laxton swapped hamburger into my PB&J. Which might have been OK, had I not been raised vegetarian, eaten it, and then vomited from the second floor into the crowded atrium where people were queuing.
posted by klangklangston at 10:10 AM on March 10

When I was about 6, my mom took me to a restaurant and ordered me split pea soup. About 15 minutes later, I vomited at the table. I'm not sure if it was projectile. I wasn't aware of the Exorcist until much later.
posted by spec80 at 10:17 AM on March 10

k8t, if your friend is looking for more exposure for their survey, they might try submitting it to the Psychological Research on the Net page at Hanover.
posted by Upton O'Good at 10:19 AM on March 10

When I was about ten or so I ate a normal-sized meal followed by a pear. Something like a minute later I had to run to the bathroom to puke and I only puked out the pear. Since then I have:
a) always been a bit wary of pears
b) the vague notion that I might have special puking skills.
posted by ob at 10:28 AM on March 10 [2 favorites]

b) the vague notion that I might have special puking skills

Only if your vomit reconstituted the pear in its original shape.
posted by Burhanistan at 10:36 AM on March 10

People who claim to like olives are liars.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:48 AM on March 10

When I was about 7 or 8, my father told me I couldn't have any of his Mallomar cookies, which were obviously his because they started with an M (his name was Martin). The next time my mother brought some home, she had taken a sharpie and renamed them Jallomars.

Since we're sharing.

Hi mom.
posted by JaredSeth at 11:00 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

Since then I have:
a) always been a bit wary of pears
b) the vague notion that I might have special puking skills.

Hadji Ali is dead; there may be an opening.

It's not TWO tomorrows I object to, it's an EVEN NUMBER of tomorrows.

fail.

When I was about 12 I lopped off the tip of my middle finger opening a tuna can. The gushing blood made me nauseous so as i rinsed the wound down one side of the kitchen sink I leaned over to the other to vomit. Just before sweet release I noted a very odd-looking spider trapped by the metal sinksides. As I puked on the bulbous spider, it exploded into billions of microscopic spiders that tried to eat my tuna.
posted by carsonb at 11:04 AM on March 10 [5 favorites]

Is the survey about childhood eating anecdotes, by any chance?
posted by UbuRoivas at 11:10 AM on March 10 [1 favorite]

When I was about 6 we had peas for dinner. Later that night I threw up the peas. I still don't like peas. What? Aren't we sharing vomit stories?
posted by govtdrone at 11:50 AM on March 10

When I was a kid, many of our family vacations involved driving from New Jersey down to Disney World. We always stopped at this one hotel that had an all-you-can-eat buffet. Every time we stopped there, we ate dinner and I ate some of the crab that was on the buffet. Every time I ate the crab, I got violently ill in the hotel room that night. It never stopped me from eating it the next time we drove down to Florida and stopped at that hotel, despite my parents reminding me about the last time I ate crab there and puked.

What was this thread about?
posted by backseatpilot at 12:23 PM on March 10

This one time, at Christmas, my uncle made peach cobbler in a Dutch Oven. And then we had it for dessert, but it tasted real funny, and we asked him what he made it with, and he said, peaches, and dough, and this brown sugar right here. And my aunt said, that's not brown sugar, that's beef bouillon. And we laughed real hard at my uncle but no one threw up.
posted by mbd1mbd1 at 12:40 PM on March 10

One time my mom tried to feed me this awful vanilla-flavored medicine by mixing it with vanilla ice cream. The resulting vomit was of greater volume than the medicine and ice cream consumed, but didn't seem to be comprised of anything else.

It was delicious.
posted by SpiffyRob at 12:43 PM on March 10

Once I had the flu and vomited so hard that a dime-sized chuck of partially eaten carrot got lodged in my nostril.
posted by Burhanistan at 12:51 PM on March 10

Didn't Obama promise to repeal nausea and vomiting?
posted by Cranberry at 1:02 PM on March 10

Once, a few years ago, my SO came into the lounge with a cup of what she told me was hot chocolate. Amid warm feelings of what a caring, kind person she was to make this for me out of the blue, I took a gulp only to discover it was gravy. To say I didn't find it as funny as her is the understatement of the century.
posted by dg at 1:12 PM on March 10

I remember when I was a kid every couple weeks or so we would have spaghetti. I loved my mom's spaghetti sauce. I guess my dad was feeling angry and trapped, and one of the ways he expressed this is that on spaghetti night he always made a big deal about me and my mom eating like pigs... if we made one slurping sound, or sucked a noodle into our mouths, he would lose it. Fly into a rage, veins bulging on his neck.

He cut his spaghetti up into little bits and ate it with a spoon.

In retrospect I realize my dad ate spaghetti like a cretin. I love him though, and he doesn't get angry like that anymore. I am not sure how he eats spaghetti these days.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:14 PM on March 10

Once when I was about 15, I took five "357 Magnum" caffeine pills on a dare. That night, home alone while my parents were out to dinner, I vomited continuously for hours. Once they did get home, my dad took me to the emergency room, where they made me drink liquefied charcoal in an attempt to absorb the excess drugs in my stomach. I vomited that too--gushing projectile black streams. To this day I am still wary of liquefied charcoal.
posted by slogger at 1:40 PM on March 10

Oh my, yes. A similar incident has put my entirely off barium sulfate.

Just thought you should know, in case I'm ever over for dinner.
posted by team lowkey at 1:57 PM on March 10

Thanks for the heads-up, team lowkey. You okay with okay with pork and/or shellfish? How about eggplant?
posted by slogger at 2:09 PM on March 10

I have sneezed spaghetti out of my nose.

It feels weird.
posted by klangklangston at 2:12 PM on March 10

Once I had the flu and vomited so hard that a dime-sized chuck of partially eaten carrot got lodged in my nostril.

This was a lot scarier when my brain temporarily forgot that dimes are the size of dimes, and not Kennedy Half Dollars.

But still. Eeesh.

One time I went to France and got some sort of virus that caused me to vomit blood. I lost 15 pounds on that trip, and all of the visits to the doctor were free! He even gave me prescription meds right out of his giant leather bag in the lobby of the opera house where I'd vomited blood all over the antique rugs! France!
posted by SpiffyRob at 2:29 PM on March 10

I vomit blood every time I go to France*.

*has never been to France
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:32 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]

When I was very young I once waited until my mother was in the shower, while my sisters, five and seven years older than me respectively, were in the den watching TV with me. I started to scream blue murder. Real Screams. My sisters looked at me as if I'd grown a third eye, and, sure enough, my mother shows up, soaking wet with a towel barely covering her, yelling "What the hell is going on in here?" I fake a few sniffles and raise an accusatory finger at my two sisters. They are promptly beaten, all the while loudly protesting their innocence of any wrongdoing.

My sisters and I aren't really close now that we're adults, but they never again tried to dress me up like Raggedy-Ann.
posted by eclectist at 5:46 PM on March 10

When I was about 8 or 9 we had shrimp cheese fondue at a restaurant. When we got home I didn't feel very well and mom gave me some pill or other to help with the nausea. Pill in mouth I reach for a glass of water and projectile vomit all over the living room carpet. Result: psychosomatic aversion to all crustaceans.

So.. it was delicious until it came back up.
posted by pyrex at 7:30 PM on March 10

On the first day of sixth grade I wore a dress and also barfed Froot Loops all over my desk. I haven't eaten Froot Loops in thirty years but still like to wear dresses.
posted by auntbunny at 10:14 PM on March 10

In kindergarden, one of the boys came in with his fingernails painter (surely the dasterdly work of some older sister). All of the other boys made fun of him until he cried so hard he puked chocolate milk all over his desk.
posted by slogger at 7:28 AM on March 11

...until he cried so hard he puked chocolate milk all over his desk.

Had he had any chocolate milk recently? If not, that's some HARD crying.
posted by SpiffyRob at 9:27 AM on March 11

When I was 5 my mom made me a pretty dress out of Thanksgiving-themed fabric with her own two hands (oh, and a sewing machine), and then just as my grandma was bringing the turkey to the table, side dishes already in place, I leaned over and threw up all over the table and my new dress.

I spent the rest of Thanksgiving wearing some horrible undershirty thing of my grandpa's.

My grandma died a year or two later. COINCIDENCE? I think I broke her heart.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 4:02 PM on March 11

All my errors can be attributed to having a 4 month old.

Anyway, her survey is aimed at adults and she has IRB approval to collect online. She needs 5 more participants, so asked people to post around.

No worries.

Thanks.
posted by k8t at 2:42 PM on March 12

I'm not sure that's a bad thing really, when you consider that most universities have a pretty rigorous set of test subject criteria and ethics (and stuff like IRB to oversee it) -- I'm not sure a bunch of random people on the internet are going to give good data that you'd get from a more controlled environment like a university campus (and with its appropriate oversight).
posted by mathowie at 11:04 AM on March 10 [1 favorite +] [!]

I have no complaints about the policy you're setting forth for the site, but wanted to clarify the role of IRBs: generally any academic survey affiliated with a university has to be approved by the REB/IRB before they are conducted, and defining and justifying the sample population is part of that process. That means that if an academic is posting a survey to the web, a "bunch of random people on the internet" is in fact the appropriate and desired sample group.

In terms of oversight, any reputable academic survey, online or not, should provide details of the ethics approval, as well as information about confidentiality, privacy, limitations of data use, purpose of the project etc as part of the informed consent process.
posted by carmen at 3:25 AM on March 13