New Study: How easy/hard is it to make you blush?

[Miriam]

Do you want to find out if you are easily embarrassed? Or maybe you never blush?

We are looking for participants in an online study on embarrassment. To participate you need to be a St Andrews student, aged 18 or above. The questionnaire will take only 20-30 minutes. Afterwards the program will let you know if you are more or less susceptible to embarrassment than other students from St Andrews. The study is, of course, completely anonymous. It is run by Dr Miriam Koschate-Reis and Dr Anja Eller from the School of Psychology, University of St Andrews.

You can directly access the questionnaire (no password required):
http://embarrassment.limequery.org/index.php?sid=91165&lang=en

Or, for more information, write to mk81@

Thanks,
Miriam

[Duggeh]

You do know that posting your email like that on a public forum will do the best job ever of increasing the amount of spam you get. People can contact you via your profile here.

[Miriam]

Thanks for the well-meaning advice. I know it will increase Spam but our ethics committee is rather strict on the issue of showing our contact details. Just hope the Spam filter is good...

Miriam

[Fawksie]

I've truncated the address in any case. It should be obvious to anyone reading that it's a University e-mail address.

[munchingfoo]

I just did the survey. Could you explain to me the need to have questions that ask A, then questions that ask ¬A? For example,

"I feel that I am in control of any situation."

"I feel that I am not in control of any situation."

Those aren't from your survey, but about half of you questions took this form. Wouldn't it just be easier to ask one way, then reverse the results if you need that info?

[steelegbr]

I just did the survey. Could you explain to me the need to have questions that ask A, then questions that ask ¬A?

I've seen that sort of thing in personality tests. The worst for it was when I applied for pilot training (it was colour vision that stopped me - which is more BS and another rant, not personality).

It's supposed to weed out inconsistent answers. It makes it fairly obvious you're screwing with the test if you answer them differently. At least it's not as bad as A and A reworded!

I would assume they do it in this test for similar reasons. Though, if you are going to make answers up to fit the test, at least be consistent.

[Miriam]

Could you explain to me the need to have questions that ask A, then questions that ask ¬A?

Hi - thanks for the comment. I know that these kind of questions are a bit strange because you get the feeling that you have answered them before. There are basically two reasons, why we use these kind of "repeated" questions:

1) More questions make the scales we use more reliable. Each block of questions (or items) form a scale that should tell us about the same concept. However, each single question/item is designed to add a small amount of extra information to that scale, thereby making the information the scale gives us more reliable. For instance, the reverse of one statement has sometimes a bit of a different meaning - e.g., completely agreeing that 'in general you feel good about yourself' does not mean that you would completely disagree with the "reverse" statement that 'you sometimes feel negative about yourself'.

2) The second reason is more pragmatic: We are using established scales from the scientific literature throughout the questionnaire, so we have to use all the questions/items provided by the authors in order to make our results comparable to results found by other researchers.

Thanks to all those who have already participated! I hope it has been worthwhile for you.

Cheers,
Miriam

[Mehmsy]

I participated, but never saw my results!

[Miriam]

I participated, but never saw my results!

It is important to submit the questionnaire at the end of the study by clicking the 'submit'-button at the bottom right of the page. Next, a grey page with white text should appear telling you whether you react more, less or just as embarrassed as other students from St Andrews to a range of situations. After this statement a link appears that leads you to a homepage giving you more information on the study and the aim of our project.

[munchingfoo]

Didn't do that for me. I clicked submit and it just said thank you.

[What?]

Mine said thank you and told me to close the page

[Miriam]

Hi!

I've checked the questionnaire twice. The first time the feedback worked, the second time it didn't. I have deactivated the survey now to see if I can fix it!

Sorry for that.
Miriam