VEWRS & AVEWRS

VEWRS & AVEWRS Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. Why have you decided to do these surveys? What do you hope to gain from this research that will benefit the Vampire Community?

Quite simply, we see several needs within the Community which we believe we can address through these surveys. There is the proliferation of published materials which are misrepresentative and negatively biased against the Community, there is the lack of a standard in research to hold such works accountable for their claims, and there are questions which Community members keep asking themselves and each other, on message boards and online discussions, which deserve solid answers.

The existing published materials on the Community represent a very discouraging trend among researchers, journalists and academicians to:

a.) Completely disregard common research standards that require evidence to back up claims made about the subject of one's writing.

b.) Inject personal observations, prejudices and fantasies into the finished product, in lieu of solid facts.

c.) In the rare cases where sources are cited at all, to ignore any process of evaluating the sources before using them as "evidence."

In examining the published materials on the Vampire Community and on real vampirism, one can find pages filled with anecdote, personal observations, and quotes gathered from roleplayers' websites being used to describe and analyze the Community. Sources like roleplaying websites, which are not representative of the Community, and whose authors are not members of the Community, are being used as the basis of various writers' analyses of real vampires.

If any other minority group or subculture received this type of treatment in print, their work might be fact-checked by an editor, reviewed by a peer group, or even reviewed and collaborated on by the group which is the subject of the writing. This is becoming more and more common in anthropology; the subjects of your ethnography might collaborate with you, help you understand obscure parts of their culture, and have a voice in your interpretation of their way of life. They may even ask for a copy of the book when it goes to press! However, the Vampire Community seems to be a group which can be written about with no fear of fact-checking, where whatever you say goes, because no one is there to contradict you or hold you to any standard of accuracy!

The result of this is a small but growing body of published materials on the Vampire Community which paint it in an unrealistic, dramatic, and very negative light. Examples of this are Katherine Ramsland's "Piercing the Darkness," and Dawn Perlmutter's "Investigating Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes." These works, if unchallenged, will represent source material that future researchers might have to go on when undertaking their own studies of our Community, and they are as fantastic as they are unrealistic. So, in a nutshell, one stated purpose of the VEWRS / AVEWRS is to address the flaws in previous research and refute the more fantastic claims made therein.

Our second stated purpose, therefore, builds on the first - to not only provide an answer to the previous misrepresentations which have made their way to print, but to raise the bar for future research. We can do this in two ways: we can provide a research model that will allow future researchers to get better access to the truth about the Community, namely, asking vampires what they actually say about their lives and experiences. And the collected answers we receive will provide a body of data which has come from real vampires. If future researchers want to cite our work, which is really the Community's work, they will be able to do so; but more importantly, if researchers and writers in the future wish to make outrageous claims about vampires, vampirism, or vampire culture, they will have to address this body of evidence as source material, and explain why their claims differ. Or, in another nutshell, we are adding this knowledge to the general body of knowledge on vampirism, because what has come before is insufficient and detrimental to real understanding, and we are creating an environment in which future research will actually have to provide evidence to support its statements about our people.

We are doing exactly that - making claims about the Community which will likely refute previously stated conclusions by other researchers, and we will have sections explaining the reasons for this discrepancy and why we think our results are more accurate and truly representative than those of others. These reasons will likely include, "they did not evaluate or verify their sources," or "the previous claims were unsourced," and "we came to this conclusion by asking questions of real vampires, which took into account their backgrounds, belief systems, and modes of involvement in various aspects of vampire culture." For example, if a researcher wants to make a claim, say, that "all vampires are Buddhists," or "real vampires are roleplayers who have taken their game too far and now live a 24/7 vampire lifestyle," an evaluation of their work could include a question as to why, in a previously undertaken and extensive study, the majority of vampires claimed to be Pastafarians and claimed never to have participated in roleplaying games.

This brings us to the third stated purpose - nevermind outsiders and academicians; what questions do we want answered about ourselves? We know that we're not all roleplayers, right? Or do we? The fact is, we "know" very little about ourselves as individuals and as a Community. We have plenty of anecdotes; individual conversations on message boards allow one vampire to share his experiences with a handful of others. From observing many of these conversations and from picking the few sensible resources from the hundreds of webpages, vampires can sort of glean what it's like for a majority of others - what's normal for vampires. The fact that vampires keep asking the same types of questions of each other, and keep sharing data that they find important, over message boards, is very telling of a perceived need in the Community for a more thorough investigation of these questions. Quite simply, we want to be able to collect a lot of individual vampires' answers to these questions - about how involved vampires are in their Community, and in what capacity; about what it's like to be a vampire on a day-to-day basis, finding donors, dealing with sensitivities that regular people don't have, relating to their mundane families and friends, etc. How many times have we all seen someone post the question to an Internet message board, "does your family know you're a vampire? Should I tell mine?" We want to be able to do the same thing with this survey, simply having the data be more widely collected and be a wider sample of the population. We want to provide a body of data that vampires can use to find out about their own people - to allow the Community to tell itself about itself.

We have undertaken a study that we hope will help the Community learn more about itself, and enable vampires to better understand the conditions of vampirism, by simply asking vampires about their lives and experiences and collecting that data in an analysis. We also believe that in doing this for our own people, we will at the same time provide a model and a body of data that will raise the standards of future research and crowd out the misinterpretations previously made by flooding the market with more accurate information.

2. Why do the surveys attempt to gather data on so wide a range of beliefs and paths?

There are indeed a very wide range of questions asked, not just of respondents' beliefs and paths, but also of their lifestyles, memberships in groups, and beliefs regarding their own vampirism and their ethics regarding their Communities. We have done this simply to avoid bias and be able to address the widest possible range of Community interests and outsiders' claims about the Community. For example, if one print source claims that vampirism is a religion, and another claims that vampirism is a practice of LaVey Satanism, we can't simply ask "are you a Satanist." It fits our research model much better to ask which religious paths respondents identify with, and allow for the diversity that we have seen vampires discuss in the online Vampire Community by allowing multiple answers. This Community is not, for example, the kind you can simply ask which church members attend! One hypothesis that has been posited to us is that we will find a mostly peaceful co-existence of extremely diverse beliefs within the Community and within individuals. If the survey turns out to support this hypothesis, then that is the data that can answer previous unsubstantiated claims that vampirism is a New Religious Movement of some sort.

Another example is the wide range of possibilities of lifestyle choice - House membership, online and offline Community involvement, and familiarity with specific elements within the greater Vampire Community. Simply put, we know that all kinds of vampires will be answering this survey, and we don't want to ignore any one individual's way of being a vampire. We want to allow all modes of participation, all lifestyle choices, from the guy with his face on a House website to the in-the-coffin grandma in rural Ontario. We want to allow all types of vampires to have a say in what their lives are like. Therefore, the Community at large, regardless of affiliation, should realize the opportunity that this survey provides in expressing their individual or path-specific viewpoints before hastily forming erroneous presuppositions of maligned intent on the part of our research.

3. What about backlash from outside the Community? Will the general public be made more aware of vampire culture? Could there be an "X-Men Effect?"

As stated above, the print sources are out there already. Some of these, like Dawn Perlmutter's essays, papers and book, "Investigating Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes," have already been actively shopped to law enforcement. There have been very disparaging portrayals of the vampire club culture in widely-available hardcover books, such as Katherine Ramsland's "Piercing the Darkness," and on popular mainstream television shows, like CSI (in the episode entitled, "Suckers"). In general, the public has been bombarded with bad information about the Vampire Community, and there is a real danger that casual consumers of popular culture will take this as source material to form beliefs about the Community and its members. Furthermore, the existence of the print sources suggests that when specialists in their fields - writers, researchers, sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of religious movements, law enforcement personnel, and religious clergy or professionals, likely are already receiving misleading information. These are people who we especially want to have true and verifiable data on what comprises vampirism and vampire culture.

Most of the information available to the general public at present is disparaging, inflammatory or alarmist. If the mundane soccer moms of the world were going to rise up against vampire culture, they probably would have done so after the infamous Rikki Lake vampire episode, the CSI "Suckers" episode, or after reading news accounts that falsely painted the Kentucky "Vampire Clan" as participants in the real Vampire Community. We simply want to balance the plethora of negative and shoddy information on the open market with a healthy dose of truth.

The next concern is usually, "what if we tell the truth and they use that against us?" Well, the truth being so much less spectacular than fiction, what will that entail, exactly? There is nothing in the truth about vampirism that endangers the Community - we intend to tell the truth to try to pull the Community's public image out of its current tailspin which is caused by the wild fantasies about our lives being portrayed on TV, in popular nonfiction, and in scholarly sources.

4. How will you deal with irresponsible survey responses of a roleplaying or fictitious nature?

Needless to say, there are always such respondents in any public vampire forum, and we expect this survey to be no different. We have structured the questions so as to be essentially meaningless to those who want to answer the survey as "Lestat." Some respondents have noticed questions which have multiple-choice possibilities which appear to allow for roleplaying-style answers. This is indeed true. In order to refute claims made by previous researchers, we have to allow these answers as possibilities. Otherwise, we can't say that vampires don’t make these claims, if they weren't given the chance to make them. If we get a majority of people who really believe the horror fiction novels as fact, well, we want to know that, too, don't we? Isn't that something that real vampires would find useful to know about their own Community?

And finally, we asked some flat-out roleplayer culture questions. Keep in mind that although we don't know which individuals answered which surveys, and can't identify individual respondents, we can correlate data from one question with another on the same surveys. We will have numerous analyses which correlate answers in this way - those who give roleplay-influenced answers in one section will also have to answer questions about lifestyle, psychic ability and Community involvement, and therefore we can make definitive statements on whether or not, for example, the same types of people who give roleplaying responses also give answers that demonstrate a familiarity with major elements of psychic or sanguine vampirism, or those which tell of a high degree involvement in local offline Community activities. In other words, we should be able to definitively pinpoint whether those who tend to give extraordinary or roleplaying answers are centrally involved or peripherally involved (or maybe even not involved at all!) with the real Vampire Community. This is something that has never been addressed in previous survey work - who are the respondents and how deeply are they really involved in the Vampire Community? Can every respondent's answer be treated as equally representative of the Vampire Community's beliefs? Absolutely not - the history of previous research and interviews with "vampires" in the media has demonstrated this quite effectively already.

5. Are you going to use the survey results to try to be an authority on vampirism? To attempt to "prove" vampirism?

No, our intent is not to prove or disprove vampirism, and we strongly believe that only each individual vampire is the authority on his own vampirism. These surveys are set up to gather data about what vampires claim is their own experience. "Claim" is the operative word in that statement - its set up to measure what vampires say is their experience. This is vampirism in vampires' own words.

We cannot verify the claims that are made in these surveys, since we can't follow respondents around and make sure they're not lying to us, and no one will be able to use the data we are gathering to "prove" that "vampires exist." The questions are specifically set up to gather data about what vampires say their lives are like. They're not set up to provide any verification of those statements that respondents will make, and in fact, some of the aspects of vampire culture, especially the experiences of psychic vampires, are totally unverifiable, even by qualified scientists.

What this will be is a body of information that the Community can point to when outsiders make odd claims about vampire culture. If a book says that "vampirism is a religious movement," for example, members of the Community can say, "but when someone actually asked vampires about their religions, the ones who responded said they were all kinds of religions - what's up with that, then?" So, no, we're not setting out to do the impossible, we're setting out to collect the data that people already toss back and forth in informal message boards, only in a formal and quantifiable way.

6. Are you attempting to authoritatively define real vampirism? To "explain" or address the phenomenon of real vampirism from the perspective of psychology, genetics, New Age energy theories, medicine, folklore, etc.?

No, the questions will speak to a research model of actually asking vampires what they say their experiences are, and recording those statements. Offering the traditional irresponsible and academically weak "explanations" of the belief in vampirism (whatever form it may take, and in whatever culture and era) is not only beyond the scope of the study and beyond our qualifications, but is rife with failures of logical and academic analysis. Many researchers have attempted to "explain" the phenomenon of the Vampire Community in the same manner that folklorists tend to try to "explain" the belief in the mythical vampires of other cultures. The logical failings that are required to make, for example, a psychological or psychopathological argument for the belief in vampires, then or now, should actually be the subject of another effort entirely. Our follow-up study (AVEWRS) addresses limited scientific or metaphysical perspectives but remains independent from the primary VEWRS baseline study.

7. Are you the Government / Press / Reality TV Producers / Inquisition?

No, we are vampires. We are also vampires who do not happen to be employed by any of the above institutions. We are doing this for our Community. Many of us have been "Independents" in the Community for years, some of us well over a decade. Most of us have watched the Community come up online, on newsgroups and mailing lists, in fanzines, Online Services like Prodigy and AOL, and finally websites and web-based bulletin boards. We have watched the Community grow from online discussions to real offline Communities of friends. Many of us have envisioned a project like this for years, but the time or the Community's level of organization wasn't really right. In the current state of the Community, we found that we could reach a large number of both House members and Independents, that we could gather enough data to make a survey like this meaningful, and we seized an opportunity to answer the thirst for knowledge that we had observed in the Community since its inception years ago.

We hope that people in authority will pay more attention to this survey than to the spurious sources that may have come before. But if we were those people, we wouldn't need to undertake this study - we already feel that we know our own people pretty well, being some of them ourselves!

8. Can we endorse your surveys?

No, but you can "support" the surveys; even if you happen to not agree with all of the questions or viewpoints. Due in large part to complex ethical and commonly held guidelines in research methodology we do not encourage "endorsements" of the surveys nor seek them on any particular web site. This is not to say we don't mind the posting of the link to the site or discussion, however, the purpose of this research is to avoid bias within the community with universal application. While we drafted and financially sponsor the VEWRS & AVEWRS we in no way intend to imply any other direct correlation between our personal beliefs and the surveys - we are not doing this for personal notoriety or profit. The VEWRS & AVEWRS are written under the premise of uniting the community under a common ideology of knowledge rather than advocate divided paths, affiliations, or sang/psi/other ascension beliefs - logic and selflessness usurping emotions and politics.