UK small mammal management and conservation research

[EMdissertation]

I'm carrying out a dissertation on views about mammal conservation, and it would be great if as many people as possible could take the time to fill out my online questionnaire so that I can find out what you think about the issue.

The questionnaire can be found at:

www.zen84405.zen.co.uk

Thanks

[Lincs Yellowbelly]

Done, i think it's massivly important to preserve native species such as Water Vole, and if that is at the expense of Mink then so be it

[eeyore]

Done

[SittingFox]

Originally Posted by EMdissertation

I'm carrying out a dissertation on views about mammal conservation, and it would be great if as many people as possible could take the time to fill out my online questionnaire so that I can find out what you think about the issue.

The questionnaire can be found at:

www.zen84405.zen.co.uk

Thanks

May I offer some feedback on the layout? (As someone who has had their own questionnaires critiqued...)

The first part, about the nature of people's interest in animals, concerns me as it appears that you can only select one category and the values aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. I personally recognise the importance of maintaining ecosystems in their interrelated state, am opposed to cruelty, and also like my two pet dogs. By asking people to select only one of these, you're creating classes that may well be artificial.

Most scientific questionnaires would give people a statement - er, say, "Temminck's Golden Cats are beautiful" and ask them to select the value that they feel best represents their views on this. Strongly agree / agree / neutral / disagree / strongly disagree. (Personally, I would strongly agree )

Yes, I know, it's a pain to have to statistically analyse all that, but you're likely to have a more meaningful result. Three categories is okay, if the circumstances suit. For my dissertation, I asked tourists in a certain national park how important wildlife was to their visit, and gave them the option of "Very important, Fairly important, Not important".

(As an aside, some of us hold the view that the most harmful exotic species to water voles is actually *sheep*, because of what they do to riparian vegetation, and would point to research apparently showing that recovering otter populations displace mink in any case.)

Sorry to be annoying, but in this kind of project you want to allow people to express their opinions as freely as possible.

[Gaina]

Done. I thought that survey was put together really well actually

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by Gaina

Done. I thought that survey was put together really well actually

I had a few issues with it but decided that it would be unnecessarily unkind to air them in the forum - if you cant say anything nice ... etc

The trouble with the strongly agree, agree,not sure, disagree, disagree strongly aproach advocated by sitting fox, is that a lot of folk have issue with the difference between agree, and agree strongly. (and the same for disagree) If you think about it if you only agree a little bit then you are really not sure, where as if you agree , you also agree strongly so this kind of thing rapidly becomes pointless.

And the most harmful species to water vole habitat is doubtless homo sapiens canalising rivers and mowing banks - and we are exotic too if you go back far enough.

[Gaina]

Originally Posted by eeyore

The trouble with the strongly agree, agree,not sure, disagree, disagree strongly aproach is that a lot of folk have issue with the difference between agree, and agree strongly. (and the same for disagree) If you think about it if you only agree a little bit then you are really not sure, where as if you agree , you also agree strongly so this kind of thing rapidly becomes pointless.

See, that's what I was thinking but I couldn't find a way to say it that would make any sense due to my current brain fog *LOL*. Thank you .

[SittingFox]

Originally Posted by eeyore

I had a few issues with it but decided that it would be unnecessarily unkind to air them in the forum - if you cant say anything nice ... etc

The trouble with the strongly agree, agree,not sure, disagree, disagree strongly aproach is that a lot of folk have issue with the difference between agree, and agree strongly. (and the same for disagree) If you think about it if you only agree a little bit then you are really not sure, where as if you agree , you also agree strongly so this kind of thing rapidly becomes pointless.

Sorry, didn't mean to cause any offence.

As for the five-ways stuff, I personally agree with you but I'm just passing on advice that I've received from people who are highly experienced in this field.

[eeyore]

Originally Posted by SittingFox

just passing on advice that I've received from people who are highly experienced in this field.

Its very in vogue at the moment because it avoids the issue of leading questions and bias but that dont mean its any good - it is particularly bad for scientific analysis which I guess is what EM is after here. It works better in the wooly fields like sociology and opinion polls as in

" I think our council wasting our council tax on pointles surveys is a good thing" Strongly disagree, disagree, agree, agree strongly , vote for some one else next time,

[matt_xyz]

there's no problem with scales of agreement such as this, and they are regularly used in scientific analysis. You can convert them to a 1 to 5 scale which then allows all manner of sophisticated statistical and econometric techniques. It might have been clearer to used the 1 to 5 scale from the outset however (i.e. ' on a scale of 1 to 5 where 5 means agree strongly and 1 means disagree strongly....')

Matt