Atheists: Take part in a study about stigma and secularism
Offline If you have the time to support this research (only about 30min), then please do. IMHO, the more research we can support in identifying the significant differences secularists have to deal with on a day to day basis, the more public awareness will raise, and the less threatening words like 'secular', 'atheist', etc. will become. Part of carving out your place in society is speaking up and proclaiming who you are.
Of course, the survey is anonymous, and it is run by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Take the National Secular Survey here
Note: This was also promoted on Richard Dawkins' site.
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[*** SPOILERS BELOW *** Please take the survey before reading comments about it, if you intend to take it. Reading commentary can subtly bias one's response, and it can invalidate the study's data. -- Mod edit 'natural']
I just took the survey and found it interesting the bias in the questions themselves. Particularly
No option for "Book of stories with detrimental value"? I was forced to choose "other" which also includes me with the don't know crowd. Which can then be easily interpreted as "Well these people don't know their opinion on the bible so they must not have read it." Whoever wrote the questions seems to be assuming that if that bible has any value it is good.
If, if a white man puts his arm around me voluntarily, that's brotherhood. But if you - if you hold a gun on him and make him embrace me and pretend to be friendly or brotherly toward me, then that's not brotherhood, that's hypocrisy.- Malcolm X
[*** SPOILERS BELOW *** Please take the survey before reading comments about it, if you intend to take it. Reading commentary can subtly bias one's response, and it can invalidate the study's data. -- Mod edit 'natural']
Yea, I dislike surveys like this. I filled it out, but there are always questions that don't have any good answer.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
[*** SPOILERS BELOW *** Please take the survey before reading comments about it, if you intend to take it. Reading commentary can subtly bias one's response, and it can invalidate the study's data.]
Yeah, guys, I had similar issues, like the detrimental value thing. However, the best way to respond to that is to send constructive feedback to the study's author. That's what I did, actually. I mentioned the problem with the Bible question; it was the main reason I sent the feedback. The intro page lists this contact information:
I actually sent my response to that email address at the bottom, asking them to forward it to the principal investigator, since there's no way I'm going to call long distance.
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I took it and when it asked where you were from, it only had US states.
Yeah, me too. I also commented about that in my email, saying I hoped they wouldn't just dump non-US respondents' data, but would perhaps make use of it somehow. Haven't got any reply yet.
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I took the survey without reading comments and as of this posting I still haven't read anyone else's comments.
Usually my gripe with surveys are the wording of questions and the answer choices available. Many of the questions didn't have enough answer choices.
The bible question forced me either say the bible is awesome and the word of God or is was nuetral, wtf? Can't I say the bible is negative?
The question on political affiliation was a scale from very liberal to very conservative? The fuck, politics is not a sliding scale, no option for independent?
The definition of secular was...strange, it included non-religious people with supernatural beliefs? How is that secular?
Yea, that was a bit weird...including hippies.
On the other hand, they it might be interesting to compare the data for hippies to atheists.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.