Hi Audrey
As you have already seen there is lots of literature on contribution.
I have co-authored a study on Wikipedia English contributors'
motivations especially in regard to gender or what is often referred
to as the Wikipedia gender gap. We will present our study, including a
long interview with Sue Gardner, and over 50 interviews with
contributors about the topic at the ICA annual conference in Phoenix,
AZ at the end of May. In case you attend, our presentation is May 27:
Best regards,
Stine Eckert
Stine Eckert
PhD Student
Philip Merrill College of Journalism | University of Maryland | Knight
Hall 2100N
College Park, MD 20742 | USA
keckert(a)jmail.umd.edu
On Tuesday 03/04/2012 at 8:33 pm, Laura Hale wrote:
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Audrey Abeyta
<audrey.abeyta(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Laura,
Thank you for your feedback. You're absolutely correct: I should have
specified that currency is in US dollars (I have now specified the
currency in the question text). I do, however, have a question that
asks about the respondent's country of residence. The questions in
this questionnaire were adapted from Hars & Ou (2001), so I tried to
deviate from their structure as little as possible.
I haven't read Hars &
Ou. My research background is I probably best
described as education, marketing and sociology based. (My
dissertation topic is actually fundamentally about online research
methods.)
When Hars & Ou did their work in 2001, were they conducting research
in online communities? And were they dealing in global populations?
By not asking both language, country and metro area, by not allowing
the expression of income in a local sense, you are creating a junk
survey that will not be repeatable. If you look at the cost of living
in Texas and compare it to Chicago, Illinois, there is a huge gulf.
The cost of housing, of petrol, the local taxes, the cost of medical
care, the local commodities in terms of food and clothing mean that
$8,000 will go much, much further in Texas than they will in Chicago.
In turn, the cost of living in Chicago will be cheap when compared to
Sydney and Canberra. These will look a bit more reasonable when you
compare the cost of living to say Tokyo or Moscow. $8,000 USD does
not go very far in Chicago, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, Moscow when
compared to Texas.
I would STRONGLY urge you to either put in a question that asks
country and metro area, and then correct for this by adjusting for
cost of living when doing your final results. If you can't do that,
I would STRONGLY urge you to remove the question because the data will
be completely meaningless. (Minimum wage in my territory is $17.78
USD.)
Your concerns regarding the over/underrepresentation of certain
segments of the Wikipedia population are also well-founded. Because
respondents are volunteers, I am aware that there may be a large
sampling bias, which I will do my best to correct for during
statistical analysis. Additionally, I will acknowledge this limitation
in the discussion section of my thesis.
How will you do sampling correction? I don't see a language
connection for one. The survey just says "Wikipedia", not "English
Wikipedia" so I assume you're talking about all Wikipedias. If not,
you will want to consider that my own response included experiences
with Simple Wikipedia. You asked time spent editing Wikipedia, but
did not ask the type of work done on the site, nor the volume of edits
done, nor the status on Wikipedia. how are you going to correct for
an over representation of English Wikipedia contributors, female
contributors, the admin core, and power contributors?
This is hugely important. If you don't have questions for allowing
for those connections, if you don't deliberately seek out minority
responses but instead advertise to a select selecting population, your
results will be fundamentally flawed and not repeatable. Given your
research questions, I suspect if we both advertised this survey, we
would get differences in answers that extremely different and
STATISTICALLY significant.
The research design here just looks very, very poor and like there is
very little done to correct for groups that may have an incentive to
contribute versus occasional contributors who have less of an
incentive to contribute and complete your survey.
--
twitter: purplepopple
blog:
ozziesport.com
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