Inflexxion Survey - BL Census 2011

Inflexxion Survey - we contracted with them to do quarterly surveys and get paid quarterly. Shortly after SG and I signed the contract, they called and preferred to do one big survey at the end of the year. I have to follow up on getting paid, but the door is open for us to have an active hand in the survey, and results. I'd like to split out the 'Inflexxion Survey 2011' to a separate thread. The heart of it is essentially a census on our membership to assess A LOT of things that would be of use to the research community (ages, geography, etc). This presents an assessment for them on what they can use BL for in terms of a candidate base. They intend to publish this, which gives us a giant billboard of ANY researcher knowing what we can offer them (= awesomeness for us!). They plan on coming back in late AUG or SEPT to hash out the actual survey questions - get our feedback on what they were planning to ask, see what all we want to include. That will conclude our contract with them, and should leave us financially covered for 2011 and a good part of 2012. We'll negotiate more with them following that, but this will lay a cornerstone for what they can or want to do with us going forward, and what we can offer to other such researchers (and get us more funding). Like I said, this needs it's own thread.

Here's a quick summary of my notes from earlier discussions, to flesh in more details for you guys. Prior to the conversation with Inflexxion and them stating they wanted to make one major survey on our membership demographics, I'd been speaking with others (SG, Chris, Hoptis, I dunno?) about getting survey functionality added-in to our site software so we could run our own, and then setting up some surveys that were kept perpetually ongoing. One of these would have been an internal census, run annually and-or on new members when they arrive. Mainly I was looking at ages, regions (ask them, and also get a quick compare against IPs as an honesty indicator), drug choices, and site feedback on how they found us, what they liked that kept them here, what they wished was different.

From my call with Inflexxion, they intend to come back to us in AUG with a rough draft of the survey, hammer out the details (with an opportunity for us to put in questions we'd want to know, and let us refine what they are asking), trial run the survey around SEP (not public, just select staff and maybe a few members to see if it functions as expected, to avoid the kind of crashing we saw with the last one), then OCT-NOV (8-10 weeks) for the live run of the survey, and publish shortly thereafter. Some surveys they do thru us for Big Pharma, and those results are obviously the Pharma's property (hence a desire for us to capture that ourselves with our own survey system), however this particular study is done by and for Inflexxion...and by extension by and for us. Our name will be all over the published results, but here's the type of content they were envisioning asking:

• Characteristics of people on BL - for this I believe they were after what I was after = age, region, education, career, language, etc...but I don't know what else
  
  
• How are they using BL info - is it for personal education, assignments, research, to help others?
  
  
• Is the site useful?
  
  
• How is it spread off site?
  
  
• How does it effect their personal situation?
  
  
• HR Views by the reader:
  
  • Aspects perceived about treatment, what helps abusers, how they feel they abuse drugs
    
  • Professionals in the field, do they reduce harm and how effective are they
    
  • How do they relate to the user's characteristics
  
  
  
• Prescription usage
  
  • Go deeper to what is non-medical, what types, tampering issues, effects of what those tampering measures do for the (ab)user, when tampering measure fail then what (sorry, my notes are kinds thin to explain further)
    
  • Routes of administration (this is a BIG one for a lot of researchers and Pharmas)
    
  • How is use effected by society (laws, costs, etc)

They view this as a one time shot, and you can see what they are angling for...and hopefully how this helps us, and possibly what else we might want to put in for our purposes. I still think we ought to have some kind of annual census, but this is a good 'out of the gate' attempt at it, one where the results can give a much better assessment of what BL has to offer the world (research AND users).

Also of note, they do intend to have an on-site presence (someone registered and active to help field questions from members and discuss results). I expect to give them an Inflexxion title to reflect they aren't some schmoe, but they also want to watch and balance that they are passive observers and not directly tainting the results by being involved.

On the last survey, they got 600 responses in a few months. The question posed to me which I didn't have exact numbers for was 'how many members do we really have?' We've had over 150k registrations, but I think we're only down around 6-8k active users. I can't give numbers on lurkers (would like to work with engineers on better assessment and management of this kind of data). We have the google analytics, which I've poked around in, and I think it can give me a lot of the info we're after, but it is active management of the site (which starts with asking what do we know, and what do we need to know) that I'm trying to get into at this point.


Bah....too long.

Would like to push to smods by Sunday. Any objections?

No objections from me. I see this as a great way to get a better grasp on what our members are here for and what brought them here and what they are taking away from the site. All insanely useful info.

No objections

Moved to Smod forum.


So, what do you guys think?

The partnership with inflexxion is advantageous, to be certain.

Having conducted and published professional research, I do want to comment on the bit about adding survey functionality to Bluelight - I think it would be very cool for our own purposes but I don't think it would provide us many benefits in terms of having a valuable asset to peddle to third parties. The main reason for this is that the integrity of the data (and the data collection process, for that matter) isn't assured.

If we're holding the keys to the participant pool, the survey process, and data collection it opens the door (in the eyes of a potential third party) for the data to be altered or corrupted in some way, intentional or otherwise.

However, getting an idea of demographics of our users might make us more attractive when we're offering our user base as a participant pool since we can give them a taste of what we can bring to the table.

Aye, your point about the data tampering is true, and we don't intend to fullly replace real research efforts. However, there is a benefit to us running out own surveys (how'd you find us, what's our census data this year, whatever project interests us, etc) - there is a secret desire of SG (and myself by extension) to not only be reference by researchers, but to get the site published if possible as well. Erowid have already done this, there isn't a reason WE can't do studies and get published