I’m an ‘older’ student attending the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. For my Sociology 101 class, our group is conducting a short quantitative survey asking people about their language use. We’d appreciate the responses, especially from non-US citizens. (This is not to say that we don’t want US respondents, but just that we don’t have nearly enough from outside the US!)
Please note: Some of the terms used in this survey are potentially offensive.
Thank you!
Thank you to those that have taken the survey! (Yay - data!) I’m meeting with my group today to see how they want to conduct the qualitative portion, but the last we talked, it seemed like they wanted to do most of the interviews for that in person.
If anyone else is interested in taking the quantitative survey above, we’re going to leave it open until at least next Tuesday (19 April 2016), but we do have to close it and start compiling results soon.
Thanks again!
When you say a word is “more feminine or masculine” what do you mean exactly? About 15% of US soldiers are women while a slightly smaller percentage of homemakers are men. Are these strongly marked as male and female respectively on that basis, or is it more the connotations that I associate with those words? (I don’t find female soldiers or male homemakers odd, so…). There’s the traditional answer, the aspirational answer, the answer that would fit my circle of friends etc.
I had the same question. The curse of postmodern survey participation!
@jsroberts , @Vert Honestly that’s left ambiguous on purpose as that’s part of what we’re interested in studying - these words are often thought to apply largely to a specific gender. One of our research questions is about how well this idea holds up in surveys, especially when answers are grouped by various demographic categories.
We also did not provide context for the potentially offensive words. This left one of my friends that took the survey contacting me to note that some of the words would be offensive if they were delivered from a stranger, but from her girlfriend were actually a turn on for her. I’m still trying to decide how to use that in our presentation!
I’m very much trying to avoid influencing any additional respondents from here, of course! If if helps to know, I’m genderqueer, so while I recognize that this sort of gendering does commonly happen, my take might be slightly different.
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