Who runs this website?
- This website is part of an ongoing research project run by Ryan T. Cragun and Mary R. Anderson at the University of Tampa.
Is this a for-profit website?
- No. We pay people for participating in our surveys, we don’t get paid for them. We conduct our surveys out of academic interest, not to sell you anything. Money for the surveys comes from grants or institutional research funds, not from corporations.
Is this like marketing research?
- Not really. We aren’t trying to sell you anything and we aren’t working for anyone trying to sell you anything. We do ask people questions and we pay them for the answers, but not to improve a product or service. We work at a University where we conduct research. Examples of our published research papers are available upon request.
How do you choose who to invite to participate in a survey?
- We use a complex process of quota sampling based on known characteristics of our target populations.
What are the odds I will be invited to participate in a survey?
- This depends upon how many people sign up to participate and the characteristics of the people in our database. Not everyone who signs up will have an equal chance to participate because we do not use random sampling from our database. So, we can’t actually tell you what you’re odds are of participating. Sorry!
What are you going to do with my contact information?
- When you register to participate in our surveys we ask you for some basic demographic information which allows us to calculate who we want to invite to participate in our surveys. That information is closely guarded (a requirement by our Institutional Review Board). We do not sell or share contact information with anyone or any institution.
How often will you email me?
- You will receive at least one email per year, but no more than one email per month. People who sign up to participate in our surveys will be sent one email per year asking them to update their demographic information in our database. So, even if you are not chosen to participate in our survey, you will receive one email per year from us. If you are chosen to participate in a survey, you will only be chosen at the rate of one survey per month. We don’t want to overwhelm participants.
Is there anything else I should know?
- Yep. If you are invited to participate in a survey but don’t respond within 1 week, we’ll consider that a strike against you. Three strikes and we’ll drop you from the database. We do this for two reasons. 1) If you don’t respond that probably means you aren’t really interested anymore. No problem; we can take care of that. (2) One of the key parts of our surveys is response rates. If you don’t respond, you hurt our response rates. We don’t like that. (Note: We’ll tell you this in the email invitation to participate in the survey as well.)
Can I be removed from your database?
- Of course. To be removed from the database just email us from the email address you used to sign up to participate and include “remove” in the subject header. Here’s our email address.