Adonis Diaries

You have social and psychology scientists intent on doing research jostling around all kinds of questionnaires.  They want to observe your psychological make-up, your set of moral values, your buying binge trends, your political ideology, ethnic behaviors and customs, you eating behaviors, ethical standards…

Those researchers claim that they can establish a good profile of an individual mental and psychological traits (and will deliver you the result of your scores to encourage you ego) and then extrapolate the results to offering general laws that describe entire community make-up, and more specifically ethnic minority on the ground that they have a good comprehension of the character of the “majority” national fundamental traits.

Those researchers boast that they only deal with published peer-reviewed articles, a close club of professionals not interested in other sources of intelligence, to entice you to taking them seriously as very talented and professional people.

What’s the point if the questions are not interested in discovering the core of a person traits such as “How much of a heart you have?”  What’s the point if you fail to asking:

“Have you fed lately a stray hungry dog, cat…?”

Have you ever  watered a thirsty flower, plant, tree…?

Have you ever looked in the eyes of a homeless person?

Have taken a minute of your busy day to chat with a stranger, and ethnic minority…?

Have you shared a piece of your hamburger or French fries with a hungry dog, cat, homeless…?

Have you visited a patient member in your extended family?

Have aided an elder family member in the daily chores?

Have you supported financially a needed family member without him asking you?

Have you spared an hour per week to talk to one of your family member?

Have demonstrated interest in the opinion of one of your family member who is marked as “crazy”?

What’s the point if a question is devoid of a specific context and related to the subject’s experiences?  What’s the point if the subject is subjected to forced-choices or binary choices that are irrelevant to the current conditions that an individual is going through?  In fact, how about discovering the subject feelings and situation at the time of answering a questionnaire so that answers are relevant to living context?

What is this “anonymous research” and the safeguarding of personal information and data, using coded numbers?  How difficult is it to transforming numbers into real name?  Actually, what’s “anonymous” in multinational corporations and their identification as “moral entity”?  What values can we extract from information having no face, or heart, or feelings?

Why researchers are not candid enough to expand on the real purpose of their research project and who is funding it and who is interested in the research?  If the researcher is neutral on who is funding and who are the interested party, and how it might be used in applications then, why should anyone of us answer these stupid questionnaires?  Would you contribute to research that promote eugenics ideology and laws?  Would you participate in a research meant to extending stupid results for discriminating on genders, race… and reinforcing apartheid systems…?

How many subjects have asked the researcher:

“What statistical analysis package will you be using for manipulating the data?”

What kind of design is your experiment based upon?

Have you tested your questionnaire on a sample people to correct incomprehension and idiosyncracies?

Would the results make any sense to you after the computer returns its numbers?

Have you investigated if your interpretations made sense using the analysis results?

Do point-data have any meaning?  For example, if your level of conscious-centered trait is very high and the average point-score is very low then, what that mean, and how it affect your overall psychological make-up?  Who is the liar, you or the model is deficient or you were under the weather at the time of answering the questionnaire?

What mathematical logic and rational are behind the equations of the analytical model?

How much do you comprehend the math model behind the analysis?

How many other alternative statistical models have you investigated to be appropriate to your interpretation?

What’s the point of answering questionnaires if the researcher is not interested in you as a particular subject and prefers that the research not be done face to face and invest time meeting with you?  Are you encouraging researchers to view you as an anonymous subject, irrelevant as a person, a point-data, an “anonymous entity”?

What if the “researcher” came out with an interpretation that goes against you interest, your family interest, and the stability of your community in the name of “scientific” basis that you know is all crap and data manipulated and distorted and biased results then, how proud would you feel of being used and abused?

Let us be bold and ask researchers pertinent questions before submitting to stupid questionnaires.  You are being manipulated and it is your right to know how you are being manipulated.