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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arbiter of Wyrms" data-source="post: 2914585" data-attributes="member: 18021">Don't be frustrated by what others have said about your poll, Xath.  It's all true.  That's okay.You will have made "significant progress" with this, even if it lends skewed results.  You may not, however, find what you set out to.  What you are collecting is a highly non-randomized sampling of voluntary responses, and you should declare as much in your paper.  You should be able to spin it reasonably well - you already have what I would call very "sexy" data Sorry, an affectation of one of my professors).  I would be curious to see the other poll as well and I suggest that you might get more respondants in common by cross-linking the two threads.  The real problems I see with the data you're collecting are:1. The data is not indexed - how many lesbian poll respondants are both underweight and under 20 yrs?  We'll never know, and it may not matter for what you want to do, but I don't believe that ENWorld really provides the means to easily do better.2. The data you're collecting is both broad and subjective: there is an appropriat BMI for everyone, but most people don't know it and so overweight/underweight is subjective.  Mental conditions run a broad spectrum of social functionality: my recently diagnosed ADD versus the Schizoid personality disorder with dissocciative tendencies of my late, non-gaming father, versus decompensating schizophrenia with paranoid and delusional features of a gamer friend versus the general (non-diagnosable) wackiness exhibited by other gamer friends.Figure out what you can really measureMeasure it with a population you can control or identify thoroughlySee what your measurements suggest about the population measuredGo back to the beginning and hypothesize about about what you think you will find (wink* wink*)Interpret your findings to demonstrate what you <s>thought </s>knew all along you would find.Suggest ways in which this research might be expanded further, either to other populations or to other conclusions with the same or similar populations.I used ENWorlders to help me on some research on the formation of gender stereotypes and received some biting criticism of my research methods from fellow ENWorlders, but my paper turned out wonderfully and earned top marks.</blockquote>

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