Atlanta Vampire Alliance [AVA]

[Merticus]

http://www.vampiresurvey.com

[Eclecta]

Survey says.... lol.

Imagines a game show called Vampire Feud.
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"Love is the law, love under will."

[Blackthorne]

I ran into zero half at last year's DragonCon. She told me about AVA, she mentioned the surveys, she offered me one to fill out. My computer died shortly after that, and it was a while before I got one that would read the disc. This, incidentally, is why I despise technology- something that could've been completed in a few hours if she'd simply handed me a paper copy instead took months to do. Technology doesn't help.

I cleared some time and sat down to fill one out, and it took hours. Hours and hours. Not just because its a long, wordy survey, but also because it touched on topics I feel very passionately about, and I never get to talk about, and on the essay sections, I got a bit verbose. It happens.

But it was taking forever, and I started skipping questions, then sections, just so I could get to the end of the damned thing, and I figured I could go back and fill in the questions I'd skipped if I had time. I must've filled in about 85% of it. There were 2 parts to it. I eventually just tanked on part 1 and went to part 2 to see if it was any different in form or function. And I read that one to the end. And that was a mistake...

close to the end of one of the parts on the surveys, was a series of questions about what should be done to/about people who break the black veil, or the 6 traditions or whatever. And it was just question after question in that same vein, about the best way to resolve disputes among vampires and donors, or between 2 vampires of the same group, or how to handle vampires breaking the law, how to handle gossip, and he said/she said situations....

and it just wore me out. Completely.
Granted, I had already just spent several hours in front of the computer, so there was a physical toll.
But mostly, it was an emotional and mental and spiritual response.
The questions were very much gothy/emo/junior high....not the entire survey, just that one small section. The survey was very well done. But the questions in that section, the level of drama it alluded to, the thought that it even needed to be included in the survey...
well, it was simply draining. I can't think of any other way to put it.
It sapped my will and enthusiasm and energy, not only for completing the survey, but for wanting to have anything to do with the entire scene. It is why I keep to myself, and stay to the fringe of any community- even one specifically designed with my interests and goals and needs in mind. People are just...work.
And that's when I realized I was putting an awful lot of "work" into filling out the survey. And that I probably shouldn't be.
I told myself I needed a break, and that I would come back to it, but every time I started to, I started thinking about that section again, and never did. And then I read that the deadline had passed while I was busy with other things, and figured there was no point in doing it now.

Also, I was mildly put off by the elaborate "this needs to be absolutely anonymous and confidential!" measures to keep my name and fingerprints off my survey results. Many of the questions were very personal in nature, and I can understand AVA wanting to protect those who don't want their names on it. I, on the other hand, feel those experiences have made me who I am, and if I'm going to relate personal matters....to turn around and make them impersonal by making sure my name is never attached to it...feels wrong.

My goals and aims are very simple ones, and maybe AVA can help me with them, maybe they can't. I don't know. I'm sorry I didn't get to fill it out in time. It was a somewhat exhausting process.

[Merticus]

Your concerns are actually addressed in our FAQ, furthermore you may still submit the surveys to: response@suscitatio.com if you are in fact 85% complete.

1.) Nature of questions... (keep in mind the wide audience we are dealing with and the red flags)

*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.

2.) As to your privacy...

Anonymous surveys protect our butts... we didn't invest time and money in these surveys to be sued down the road because someone's boss or spouse finds out they are a vampire (using their name) and fires or divorces them... You can be as personal as you wish answering these surveys - but we don't want to know your name.

3.) As to why they are long surveys...

*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.