University of Kent survey

There is something wrong with their system then, if anyone can tick a box and effectively evade ethical scrutiny.

Thats pretty much what the dude i spoke to said. He comes from another branch of psychology and was not impressed

Thank you so much for the update.

I think psychology is an important topic and there is research which can genuinely help us understand, the human mind, social interactions and how we can help people in distress to be able to move forward in their lives.

To have researchers like this, giving psychology a bad name with poor surveys, posted in an inappropriate manners with no prior review from an ethics board is detrimental to psychology as a science. It really annoys me. It took a long time for psychology to become respected, we don’t want to lose that respect.

Just an update on this. I complained to the head of research ethics about this survey. Took them a while to respond, but we had a good chat last week. I wasnt the only one to complain it seems. He sent me a copy of the survey. At the top was TERFS in large bold font... It seems the study authors ticked a box, so it wasn't actually reviewed by anyone.

He agreed that both the method of recruitment and the quality of the survey were very poor. It is going to be discussed at their ethics board next week i think. I don't think he was very impressed.

Anyone get any response to this? Been a full working week and i haven't heard a dickie bird

I agree. What insight do they think they're bringing to this that they couldn't copy and paste out of some shitty Vice article?

Probably naive of me, but I expected people sufficiently interested in psychology to do a PhD in it to be able to model other people’s thinking better than this. What reaction were they expecting to that survey?

I can’t believe their research on conspiracy theories has any value at all. You’d need much better than average cognitive empathy to understand conspiracy theorists. These researchers seem to be impaired in that area.

I also saw this survey and was utterly appalled, especially after finding out that the researcher was fresh from attending a conference on conspiracy theories.

See #easpconspiracy

Yes me too, Yet

Is it just me getting a sense of Deja vu about this?

I'm sure something similar was posted a year or so back. I even remember doing the survey just to skew the results!

In (slight) defence of the "researchers"...

I haven't seen the survey this thread has been talking about, but I have previously seen a different survey that asked some bizarre questions about religious beliefs / abortion etc.

At the time I remember it was suggested that there is some sort of standardised scale of attitudes used, that is very US-centric and the questions seem very out of place in a UK context.

Obviously there is no excuse for the other faults of the survey, but that may be an explanation for some of the odd questions?

Well yes, it doesn't appear that the recruitment is "fair and appropriate". The biased way it's written is likely to put off many of the women they are supposedly wanting to hear from.

I guess the ethics committee should be interested in the fact mnhq took their survey down because of their behaviour?

How DARE they push out this utter shit.

How DARE they. Because I know that sexism is to do with sex not gender.

That I MUST be very hard line in a religious branch that CAUSES SO MUCH SUFFERING MURDER AND DEATH TO WOMEN AND GIRLS BECAUSE THEY ARE FEMALE ALL OVER THE WORLD IN UNCONSCIONABLE NUMBERS.

Yeah go fuck yourselves quite frankly.

You are extremely biased.
You enjoy stereotyping those you don't agree with and I'm guessing you can't even see it.
We are but AMERICAN FFS. God's law, concept of evil? What the actual fuck are you on about? It's bizarre and uselessly out of context here apart from some groups, areas, sects. Who are spread around the place and if you want THEIR views then you need to go ask them. This is MN. Posting here makes fuck all sense.

And BIG PROBLEM. Those questions are not inclusive across religions/ no religion. That is a massive problem. You have seemingly totally failed to remember that there are lots of religions in UK and so the survey exhibits religious insensitivity. And someone who is filling it in is of a religion that is poly- theistic, does not have a God, or they are called something else. Well they might feel pretty pissed off right? Been forgotten. Ignored. EXCLUDED.

what a total fucking shitshow.

I did not see the full survey but have seen some of the questions on this thread.

This is my PERSONAL reaction and not meant as any kind of further comment on the area that I am surprising angry about. Like, actually really fucked off indeed.

I was born and raised RC.
I never believed even though at convent school for primary and lots and lots of religion. Some teachers nuns. This was in England.
So I have been an atheist my whole life.
I have also been a feminist from before I knew the word.

None of this is learned. It's just a fundamental of how I am and always have been.

Around the world many religions in particular the abrahmic trio have caused massive amounts of harm around the world. War, murder, oppression, torture.

As background RC I have always seen that the (traditional now watered down in places) views on abortion, contraception, homosexuality, sex in general etc have caused just outrageous immense suffering and harm to vast amounts of people through history and over the world and still today for millions and millions.

(I have no issue with RC individuals btw as a blanket thing I mean get to know people etc round here you'd be hard pressed to find any who even slightly took notice of those things for them or others).

Sorry going on but I'm SO FUCKED OFF...

There is a clear invitation to complain if you have any ethical issues with the study. People aren't required to be university educated and aware of academic pressures to do so.

complaining to ethics about the methodological weaknesses is rarely helpful - ethics committees don't have the expertise to evaluate the methods of every study in detail, nor should they because it would be far too slow and restrictive. for an unpaid online survey study, the ethics committee would evaluate

• do participants give informed consent?
• do they know how their data will be stored & used?
• is recruitment fair & appropriate?
• does the study comply with GDPR?

if you think there are issues with those, complain about them. Otherwise, ethics probably can't do much. but I imagine the researchers have already learnt a lesson about jumping into this pit of vipers with a badly worded survey.

If people want to complain, I would focus on the ethical issues – ie that the methodological weaknesses are so significant, that it renders the survey findings unusable. This is an ethical issue because you are basically wasting people’s time. Also, it's an ethcial issue that the assumptions and biases of the researchers are obvious, and offensive.

Thanks GCmiddle, that's helpful.

Also, I think the fact they cheerily dumped their survey in the middle of several threads where women were discussing the midwife crisis and maternity policies along with their own experiences of these issues was grossly inappropriate, and served to derail those discussions until MN stepped in to delete their posts.

They used the excuse (on their own thread afterwards) that they didn't realise how MN worked, but any researcher who's reaching out to potential subjects on social media should be able to work out how topics and threads work - it's really not unique to MN, and they showed a shocking disregard for serious maternity issues and for the women affected by them.

A PhD student and a Post Doc from a different university? Is this then part of a university supervised research programme or an attempt by two random individuals to generate propaganda?

It depends where you, or I, or this researcher thinks sexism comes from. To me and to a lot of posters on MN, changing your life so that you are 'living as the opposite sex' is in some cases a form of sexism, strongly associated with homophobia. Look at a video game company in the US run by four late-transitioning transwomen, including a married couple. Well, great, it must be a congenial and non abusive environment for them. But they say that a man who works for them 'is their only male employee', one at least appears on lists of top women in tech, and apparently has 5 children (also interviews delightfully, lovely personality). How many women in tech have five children and run a company with a programming background? The woman who bore these children in her body is invisible. Maybe she chose to be invisible. Maybe she didn't. It reeks of sexism and my young colleague seems to have no thought for the reality of what sexism is.

Crikey! Those questions are useless. Do those two academics honestly believe that people who disagree that people can ever change sex and that any male who feels like a woman is a woman, have anything like those opinions?

Did they honestly believe that posters on MN would not pick apart their dodgy questions?

I really despair what this study would have even showed. Where was any nuance?

Delurks

University of Kent is on my DCs list of university choices for next year and we are visiting to look round in the next couple of weeks. I wasn't quick enough to see the survey but if anyone can pm me details/screenshots I will take a look and be very happy to contact Kent and let them know how it has affected our thoughts about Kent as a choice

Isn't this the equivalent of the small child putting its hands over its eyes and believing that the person in front of it has vanished?