Thanks Meantangerine, yip I agree the crying intensity question is in need of rewording - some of the above questions originate from my current online questionnaire (more on that in a moment) and I tweaked the options a bit as I felt it was weighted too heavily in the almost crying state as opposed to the actual crying state. Your suggestion introduces something different as well which is that the intensity changes during a crying episode - which of course it does. When I orginally came up with the question I was thinking peak intensity (which I didn't really make clear) - so need to decide if we want to ask the question as just peak intensity or expand to include changes in crying intensity throughout the episode - thought's please.

I've been looking into the questionnaires I received from my current online survey (www.crying-survey.co.uk) - I originally used an Access Database with a Delphi front end (tech speak sorry - basically a windows based programing language) anyway to cut a long story short when I upgraded to Windows Vista (and then Windows 7) Delphi no longer worked so I lost the analysis functions and the ability to import the questionnaires from my Outlook mailbox.

But, Outlook and Excel 2010 have better data import/export functions and with a lot of data manipulation I'm slowly finding a way to import the data into Excel where I can do some analysis on it. The data is not formatted correctly to do much analysis but a bit more work should enable me to get some numbers from it quite soon. All I know so far is I have a total of 2239 completed questionnaires, 1908 Females (85.2%) and 331 Males (14.8%).

This new questionnaire, once we all chip in and get the wording just right and it ask what the members on this forum want to ask (more input please) I think we should try and get 'normal' people to complete. Don't know how to do that just yet but we can think up some ideas on that later. The problem I think with the online questionnaire is that people who complete it are already looking for crying on the internet so are arguably not 'normal' with regard to their current crying habits. I want people who have never thought about their crying to complete this new set of questions.

I'm going to be on holiday for a week or so (from tomorrow) so there's time to have a think about some of the questions currently being proposed - I'll have limited internet access but probably not enough to response so I'll catch up with you all when I get back.

Really excited about this questionnaire being a collaboration of the members of this forum and coming up with a really good set of questions. Please take some time to read through the questions and drop me some suggestions, your input is valued and important. It's also worth thinking about the method these questions will be put to people - hand filled in, or via internet (invitation only perhaps) - or a bit of both. One reason why I opted to have the questionnaire in a multiple choice style format - people just select options and don't have to write much.

Hi Woundedpuppy, also on holiday so not easy to respond via an iPhone!
Not looking for people to complete this survey at the moment, more looking for help in shaping the wording and questions asked. You are good with words so would appreciate your critical eye :o)
We can catch up when we are both back from holiday - hope you are having a good one.

No, I understood what you were asking for, Tearhunter... I think I'm taking up the position that, although it's a wonderful experiment and a fascinating study, I have a difficult time making suggestions because I feel like surveys about crying behavior are, themselves, quite hard.  At least they are for me, and because of this, I guess I question how accurately others are able to fill them out, especially non-observant (non-fetishist) "normal" people.  The only way I could do it accurately myself would be to keep a crying log.  Don't know if things could be set up online (not in connection with this forum, of course) so that interested people could report their crying as it happened, sort of keeping an online journal of their crying behavior while it was still fresh in their minds, with a login name or something.  If so, that would be cool.  Though anyone who would bother to keep at it over a long period of time would have to be extremely interested (thinking of a guy who cries only a few times a year, it's hard to imagine him returning to the same site after months of not thinking about it!)  I know for crying questions, I am better at general subject-matter type questions (like what types of things would make me cry, who I would feel comfortable crying in front of) than data-oriented questions involving the number of times I've cried over a period of time, length of time I cried, or even the most recent episode, physical details of the tears during that episode, etc.  If I had the mindset to keep track of the data and wrote things down as they happened, I know I would be able to be pretty accurate, but again, I'm not saying this is something the average member of the public would necessarily want to do (at least without some type of incentive or natural keen interest).  Just saying it for whatever it might be worth, I guess.  My few crying observations of other people are more accurate, and with the men, I remember ALL the details that are possible to remember... no surprise there! ;)

Like I said, I'll still try to make a better contribution when I have time to really think about it, so sorry I'm kind of overwhelmed with it right now.  I love that you are doing surveys and it's a huge advantage to the crying fetish community that you are doing them.  I guess maybe what I'd love to see is people writing something out in their own words about a time that they cried.  That way, it would read just like an observation and there might be some details that were particularly interesting that might not surface any other way except for if they wrote it all out.  I understand how that might make it seem like too much effort for the participants though... I dunno, doesn't matter... but I wish you luck with the updated survey, and I can definitely help with proofreading for typos when it gets to that point!

Eeps, this turned out longer than I thought, haha.

Last edited by woundedpuppy (July 4, 2012 12:23 am)

OK, here's my attempt:

Questions are probably easier for most people to answer than I originally thought -- I just do bad on answering whenever my last crying episode was because I know I tend to cry about relatively unremarkable things at times (like long standing problems!), so with things like that, I don't really have a clue when I cried about it, or for how long etc, but I certainly remember more remarkable or special crying events.

Typos:
9) "succession" not "secession"
11) "brother" not "bother"
18) "ever" not "every"

Looks good to me otherwise.  If there's room for a 25th question, I personally like the idea of knowing HOW to get someone to open up... goodness knows I've failed at that one before!  So don't need to use it, but, if I were to come up with a suggestion, I guess it would probably be roughly along the lines of...

On a painful subject or issue that might make me cry or get emotional, I am MORE likely to open up to a friend if:

- I bring up the subject on my own (being asked prying questions by a friend rubs me the wrong way or makes me feel more self-conscious, embarrassed, or closed off in general)
- the friend pries with questions about the subject (I might feel too self-conscious or embarrassed to bring it up on my own, but if a friend brings it up, I feel less self-conscious and more like opening up to them)

The wording is probably not that great, but that type of idea.

Eeps, I can't think of more, even though I'm sure there's more... told you I suck at this. ;)

OK -- I'm done!

Last edited by woundedpuppy (July 9, 2012 2:42 am)