Cave Diving Research Survey (for OW divers too!)

Hello, my name is Michael and I am a Junior at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, Florida. I'm researching cave diving in my economics degree program, and have put together a survey to help me to that end.

I need atleast 100 respondents from three categories--cave divers, non cave divers, and non divers. I'm posting the survey on several forums to try and get those responses.

If you could take a couple of minutes to answer these questions, I'd appreciate it! Your information will be entered into a database and your name will not be revealed to anyone, anytime, for any reason, so please answer honestly. However, in order for this to happen, you'll have to PM or email me your completed survey.

I will be posting the completed paper on this forum once it is done, which will hopefully be before the end of the semester!

Thank you for your help!
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHZkOW53ZVczVUszSk1pd2F1Q1NkVmc6MA

How do you know what category the respondent falls into since the question is not asked?

Can you enter something other than a whole number or will it be rounded to the nearest whole number in the spread sheet?

Some questions may be answered differently depending on how the diver interprets the question. For example I think non cave trained OW divers are at extreme risk of dying in a cave, but most of the attrition will occur fairly early. If an OW diver does it on a regular basis for a year and survives, some learning obviously occurred and you have more or less the situation that existed early in cave diving where no formal training existed and where they drug a body out of Peacock about once a month - but where obviously not everyone died. In that case, the factor of doing it for a year could be critical or irrelevent depending on the point of view of the diver. The answers consequently may be different than asking about an OW diver's chances of surviving one dive, 10 dives, 100 dives etc, in a cave. Do you want that level of interpretation and/or are you controlling for it? Will there be systemic bias in how it is answered among respondent groups? Which takes us back to how do you know what group a respondent is in?

The definitions are not well operationalized. How injured is injured and does it matter if it was in a cave, underwater, climbing out of the sink, in the car on the way there, etc. How active is active? If a diver does 24 dives per year, they may regard that as "active". If I only did 24 dives in a year I consider that a year off from diving.

Similarly, you need to consider an element of exposure in the survey to see how often the rspondent dives - if for nothing else than to see if that that impacts the responses.

DA Aquamaster-- I am not the master of surveys or research. This is the first time I've done research like this. I'm studying for an undergraduate degree. Hence, this will be FAR from perfect. Even if I wasn't a total newbie at this, because I only have a limited amount of time to research (ie: a due date coming up soon), there is no way I can conduct a perfect survey.

You can enter any decimal you want, though once you get past the trillionth's place, it seems silly

The injured part is one of the questions of "lesser" importance. Depending on what trends I find, I may or may not choose to include analysis of that answer in my research.

Similarly, the other questions are not as in depth as they could be, because to answer the question without any leeway would involve so many sub questions, it could get really difficult. Same reason there's no validation question, because I don't feel like contacting certification agencies to double check certification numbers to ensure a person is who they say they are.


All that said, I need a lot more non-cave-diver responses!!

Survey completed. I'm a cave diver wannabe so qualify as a non-cave-diver now.

JahJah, survey was completed. I understand how difficult it is coming up with a survey and statistical analysis for your research. I had to do many of these as a grad student! Good luck on getting your n to equal 100 or greater.

I've filled out your survey, and I will be interested to see the results. Clearly this is not scientific because it is self selecting. Also, the general nature of the questions is far too vague.

For example, the gross figures of auto deaths take into account passengers as well as drivers; so the figure should be expressed in deaths per x miles (usually per 100,000 miles).

The same would hold true for diver fatalities. Here's an example: each year there may be several deaths during the sport lobster season. Suppose there are five deaths in two days during the short season in Florida. that may seem like a huge number of divers dying, but if it is expressed as deaths per x diver hours, it might be a relatively low number.

There are other factors as well, such as experience and whether the diver deaths happened during specific types of evolutions and if there was a diver professional involved.

I don't mean to question your methodology; but if you are drawing conclusions from the data it would be important to ensure you are getting the best available raw information.

This data could only be expressed as opinion, nothing more.

By the same token, I'll be interested in seeing what people think.

Good luck,

Jeff

Done. Please post here when the results are available.

Survey completed ... best of luck with your project.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

Maybe for his grad work he can get more indepth with his project

How many non divers do u need still? I can post on my FB page as can others if u need more help....

Letterboy-- I can use as many as I can get: the larger my n, the better. Currently, I only have 40 non cave diver responses. I have 70 cave diver responses. I want atleast 100 of each, but would be thrilled to have more.