Or be rectangular prism

Ari Wow. 21. Queer. Mixed. Prefer to be referred to as: "Ari."
N. Virginia born, NoVA&Cali raised.
Into Feelings&Thoughts.

trigger warnings: i take accountability for the fact that i have not done tws in the past. i will from now on be conscious of putting "tw: [content that may be triggering]" before posts that i think need that. i will also put those into the tags for use w/ things like savior. please let me know a preferred system for you/tw's that i do not do that you need and/or want.

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small victories, ways to go

(background: this summer, i am working as a research assistant with a PhD grad student in a cognition and development psychology lab. we are working together on producing and running 2 studies over the summer. psych studies often include using online surveys. we’ve all gotten those before, where the question is followed by the little bubbles, and usually you must make a forced choice between a few things. sometimes none/more than one of them apply to you, or if you don’t feel like answering, you have to answer anyway.)

today while making a survey that will go out to over a hundred people, i asked “couldn’t we add the option ‘prefer not to answer’ to these?” when making the final edits and looking over the demographics section (sex, race, ethnicity, education level) which participants are “not required” to answer but often feel forced to/are tricked into answering. it is also important to add that the participants that will be taking many of these sorts of surveys are paid some amount of money for their participation so it becomes a matter of coerced choice to answer something that may be uncomfortable/seem uneccessary in order to ensure that they get the money. so, in the end, my advisor was really chill and agreed that we should add those options to the demographics questions. so there’s one survey that is slightly less fucked up. and i know that if i had gotten it, i’d feel really great about those options being available. but that doesn’t even touch on the topic of who is taking these surveys, and the fact that you can choose to get paid in one of three ways: US dollars, Amazon credit, or Rupees. there are a lot of other things im thinking about in relation to psych. but i am very privileged to be here and to see the other side of research and will hopefully find a way to use my position to make incremental changes to the practices (while im here? hopefully sustainably) and hopefully ill gain a better understanding of the systems within for use after i’m done here.

  1. cleanlinez posted this