University of Kent survey

[MillicentFaucet]

I really don't want to believe that the people who signed off this research knew how it was going to be presented on MN. I grabbed enough info to have a dig about, I really hope that the psychology dept of Kent University didn't intentionally seek to paint the many thousands of MN users as bigots.
But it appears that the deleting of everything to do with it suggests the people responsible are aware of unethical it is.

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?

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!

Yes me too, Yet

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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