I believe the current task at hand is to decide if anything should be improved or added (or subtracted, if you give a good reason) before releasing the survey to the general public.  Tearhunter wanted our suggestions for wording of the questions, etc.  Sorry if I've managed to confuse anyone by referring to my own personal insecurities about answering data-related crying questions!   

tears wrote:

are we to take part in this?

or do we send it to you?

Yeah, I like your suggestion and look forward to reading what you come up with!!  In a way, I liked purposely forcing the answer (as either an a) or b) answer) because what interested me most is whether it is worse to ask someone questions or worse to say nothing about it (as far as chances of them opening up to you if you think there is something bothering them that they aren't talking about).  However, I know it actually depends on many, many factors (what questions are asked, the relationship to the crier, whether the non-crier already knows about the issue or is part of the same issue, etc)... I was so overwhelmed with the range of possibilities that I just decided to go really broad and paint the whole thing black and white (and added the "friend" bit as an afterthought, probably for selfish reasons, haha).   But yes, removing the friend bit and using a list of several answers that covered more bases would probably bring more accurate results.  I still wonder if people can pick between the two options -- I decided I was the type who is more likely to open up if I am questioned than if a person says nothing -- I am shy and don't want to bother people with things I think they might not want to hear, but I am much more open than I appear (looking for connections, hoping for deeper relationships), so if someone ELSE initiates the conversation, as long as they are nice about it, I am more likely to open up.  However, I know there are some proud types who like to be in control, and for them, I would think that they would talk about their personal issues only on their OWN terms and when THEY feel like talking about them and would be more likely to turn mute on the subject if they felt that someone else was trying to lead the conversation to a dark place.  I understand that position, I'm just curious, population-wise, how the numbers balance out between the personality types and between genders.

Last edited by woundedpuppy (July 10, 2012 1:09 am)

Neat -- well done.  The argumentative and dismissive question looked so different from the rest that I would have almost taken it out, but then I think it gives them a chance to contrast it with the more positive things and perhaps reflect on their other answers more accurately, which is a good thing.  There is a typo ("emotional", not "emotion").  I can't think offhand how to word things differently, but I'll let you know if I think of something. 

Is it kind of what I was looking for?  Truthfully, not really, but that's OK!  What I really want to know, I guess, is specific to "conversation initiation" -- how it starts -- people initiating conversations on emotional subjects and what the potential crier's reaction is to this attempt of initiation of a deep subject by someone else.  I don't see this topic reflected at all in Question 11.  Like, is their reaction going to be positive (they open up to you), negative (they think it's too personal for you to bring things up), etc.  But honestly, no one needs to come up with a new question just for my sake.  My guess on this topic is that, in life in general, you have to be super-careful when initiating personal discussions.  I bet almost no one responds favorably to "nosiness", so you have to be careful not to come across this way (even if you really are dying of curiosity).  I bet some people would respond to the initiation of an emotional topic by opening up and others would respond by changing the subject.  The divisions, statistically-speaking (with regard to age and gender), would be fascinating to me, but there are so many factors to consider here that I'm not even sure how I could word it.  So, like I said, no one needs to accommodate me... carry on with whatever survey you want to do! 

By the way, at first I was thinking that more men probably try to change the subject than women (are avoidant about opening up when someone else initiates the topic), but now I'm not so sure... it could be that women might be more open about WHY they are changing the subject ("I'm sorry, but I just can't talk about that right now... it's too painful"), and men might be more discreet (finding a reason to get up and leave, for example, rather than admit a subject is too uncomfortable for them). 

Anyway, I look forward to hearing about the personal reference ID!

I've added another category type question - think it's worthwhile capturing a persons marital status

@meantangerine: I've amended the second last question slightly - I get what you are saying with regard to sobbing (noise) and tears (visual) being two different things, but I think I'll keep the question as one rather than splitting it into two - I've already broken my 25 question rule! It's more about the intensity of the crying this question and the noise / visual aspects are covered by the crying characteristics questions towards the end.

@woundedpuppy: I've been thinking about your comments and I can't think of an easy way to ask a question which covers exactly what you are after. I think it would need to be some sort of multi-dimension question because it would differ depending on the person you are crying in front of - so you would need to have a series of options for each type of question which, per person type - I think would make the questionnaire to complex and long which I am trying to avoid. We can look at some of the results from this question and see what comes back you might get something of what you are looking for at least from the point of view whether people are comfortable crying in a particular scenario or whether in general they particular dislike crying in a certain scenario.

Ok, the Personal Reference Id idea - well I thought about the problem of getting accurate responses. As some of you have commented it's can be difficult to remember exact details of past crying events and it is at best a guess at times. And with some people being better than others at completing a questionnaire the results are variable. This will continue to be the problem with this new style questionnaire and the current (long) questionniare I have on the web.

So, I'm going to post a new diary style questionnaire in addition to the above questionnaire which is designed to record a single crying event completed by the subject as soon as possible after the crying event has occurred. There is a number of issues surrounding how we get people to remember to complete a crying diary for an extended period of time but as with the questionnaire above we can tackle this problems on a separate thread in time.

But, one thing is clear I need to link multiple questionnaires together and associate them to a single individual - with a Personal Reference Id this becomes possible and retains a degree of privacy as it does not need to be associated to a persons name. The reference will not be a login, this is too complex to put together for this type of web site but the subject would need to enter a reference provided as part of the inviation to join the study which I would issue at that time.

I plan to have three questionnaires running concurrently: the existing questionnaire will continue to be available via www.crying-survey.co.uk - this questionnaire will not link directly to the new questionnaires and it will continue as it does at the moment. The above questionnaire will be defined as an invitation questionnaire (www.crying-survey.co.uk/invitation/) and is intended to be the first port of call for anyone invited to complete the questionnaire (rather than found via a web search like the original questionnaire) - they will be given a reference and the category elements (age, martial status etc) will be captured by this first questionnaire - bit like an initial registeration. For many this will be the only questionnaire they complete, but if they go onto agree to complete a crying diary then they can use this reference to post diary entries from a third questionnaire (details soon, similar in style to the above questionnaire).

Once you guys have reviewed both the invitation questionnaire (referenced above) and the diary questionnaire (I'll post this soon) then I'll construct the website to handle the filling in of all the questionnaires. Once built I would appreciate your help in how we get the 'right' sort of people to complete the questionnaires and how we go about inviting them - a significant challenge in itself I think but one if successful should bring very interesting results.

Your thoughts are always very much appreciated - as long as you don't say I've bitten off more than I can chew !   

Just a general question about the results-- will we be able to view each individual's responses, or will we only see the total results/percentages after everything has been added together (as in the current questionnaire results section)? Sorry, I don't think I phrased that too well, but I'm too tired to think anymore.