Our Survey Says

I have been suffering from a lot of spam recently. Must get some pills for that - oh yeah, I can get cheap pharmaceuticals from viagra to panadol, a Russian doxy to mud-wrestle the Nigerian Princess who wants me to launder her inheritance, to compete for the honour to feed the pills to me, while I drink margueritas on the island I bought with that suprise prize draw millions courtesy of Microsoft.

So it was with some trepidation I opened the e-mail titled: Internet Research Project. What can I say? I walk on the wild side. I opened it up and was curious to see the contents. Not curious enough to follow the link though. Instead I sent an e-mail and asked if the sender was a real person as I had enough pills, Russian babes and money. Very quickly, I received a reply. It is indeed kosher research for a PhD thesis on the personality traits of bloggers. After I did the survey, I asked whether the PhD student would like me to put her survey out there. I've copied and pasted the contents of the first e-mail. It would be really cool if you bloggers could follow the link (sorry lurkers)and complete the survey. It would be even cooler if you would copy and paste the link on your blogs.

Go on, make this your good deed for the day.

Dear Blogger,

I am a doctoral student in the psychology department at the University of Texas at Arlington. I am completing my dissertation research on the topic of the personality characteristics of bloggers. One of my goals for this study is to contact actual bloggers and record their self-reported personality traits, and view information posted to their blogs.

I am writing to ask you to take a few minutes to participate in this study. As a participant, you will be asked to follow the link in this e-mail to the Survey Monkey website, where you will complete several personality questionnaires, and provide some information about your typical internet use. At the end of this survey, I will ask you to provide a link to your blog so that I can match the personality data that you provided with information that appears on your blog.

It is important for you to understand that no personal information will be collected in this project. You will not be asked to provide your name, address, e-mail, or any other identifying information. I will ask you to provide the URL to your blog so that I may access it after you complete the survey, and record information from your profile (such as gender, age, and location). I will also download two of your blog entries for further analysis; however, identifying names and information will be redacted. I will not specifically identify any single blogger in the reports of this research. In other words, I intend to talk about bloggers in general, but not any one individual in particular.

If you are interested in participating in this study, please follow the link below to the Survey Monkey website: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/L7M59GV

Thank you very much for your time. If you have friends or colleagues who you believe might be interested in participating in this study, feel free to forward this information on to them. You may also contact me with any questions that you have about this research project.

Best regards,