UPDATE #2: Responses have slowed to a trickle, so the survey is now closed. Thanks to everyone who completed it, results next week!
Two years ago, when this blog was only a few months old, we surveyed y’all to learn something about who you are, and get feedback on how we can improve Dynamic Ecology. That was really valuable to us. You might be surprised to hear this, but we don’t have that much information (and hardly any non-anecdotal information) about who reads this blog or what they think of it. Having a bit of information helps us justify our blogging to our employers and funding agencies, and helps us get better.
We’ve changed in the last two years, and our audience has grown a lot. So we’re doing a new reader survey. Please take about 2-4 minutes (which is all the time it should take) to complete the anonymous survey below. Please fill it out even if you’re not a regular reader; it’s much less helpful if only our biggest fans complete the survey. We’ll summarize the results in a future post. Thanks in advance for your help!
UPDATE: Thanks to a correspondent who pointed me to this resource, I’ve realized that the question on gender could’ve been structured better. I wanted to ask about this because the last survey indicated that our readership skewed heavily male. And I wanted to be inclusive rather than just limiting the options to “male” and “female”. But just including a “transgender” option wasn’t the best way to be inclusive. In retrospect, instead of “transgender” I probably should’ve gone with an “other” option letting respondents fill in their preferred gender identification. That’s what I’ll do on future surveys.
No Option for “research scientist” or other non-tenure track academic careers other than ‘other’? That’s okay, I don’t get to feel marginalized as most, so I’ll take one for the team
Neither of the faculty options says “tenured” or “tenure track” faculty. That’s deliberate, it’s so that adjuncts, soft money faculty, fixed term faculty, etc. can pick those options.
Plus, I’m sorry, but “convenience of the person who has to analyze the data” is a consideration here. Adding a plethora of options to try to cover all the bases would make the survey unwieldly, plus I’d still need an “other” category because it’s not possible to list all occupations by name. I guess I could’ve gone with “other (please specify)”, though, as was suggested to me for the gender question.
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