Thanks to everyone who completed and/or shared the survey I posted back in January! I finally got around to start digging into the results. There were so many responses (>1,250 usable responses) I actually had to pony up $300 for an annual "Gold Level" subscription to the survey software just to be able to play with all the data.
Below are the straight up responses, which I promised to share. I intend to do some analyses and see what I might really find in here; in market research, simply looking at the answers is only the beginning. Preliminary crosstabulations seem to indicate that there are interesting trends when you cut each question by the others. (eg break out responses by age, dive experience, cert level, etc)
Unfortunately there are a few tremendously confounding artifacts/limitations of this study that will likely make drawing exquisitely refined conclusions very difficult.
Limitations include:
- Survey was only conducted among current, active divers who frequent scuba-related websites
- More than half of the respondents were from ScubaBoard
- The remainder of respondents were obtained from the survey being shared by divers on social media-
- Most of the social sharing of the survey skewed towards experienced tech/wreck/cold water divers
- In short, the methodology skewed heavily away from average recreational/warm-water divers
Artifacts caused by those limitations can be seen in the first few questions below, where you'll notice that respondents skew older, very experienced, and highly-certified. (More than 20% of respondents were Instructors.) Further, the results obviously contain few non-divers and likely zero "former" divers.
Many folks were confused/perplexed by a few of the questions, how they were worded, or simply wondered what "the purpose of the survey" was. The purpose was just to sort of poke around a bit to see what I could find. I do have a hypothesis that certain beliefs/perceptions held about scuba diving are highly variable. The specific methodology, analytics, and interpretation behind a few of the questions is proprietary in nature but I've included the straight-up responses here as well. Will be interesting to see what sort of conclusions people draw from the responses.
With that as introduction, here are the answers to the questions...
I look forward to the discussion - thanks again to everyone who took part!
Ray
Below are the straight up responses, which I promised to share. I intend to do some analyses and see what I might really find in here; in market research, simply looking at the answers is only the beginning. Preliminary crosstabulations seem to indicate that there are interesting trends when you cut each question by the others. (eg break out responses by age, dive experience, cert level, etc)
Unfortunately there are a few tremendously confounding artifacts/limitations of this study that will likely make drawing exquisitely refined conclusions very difficult.
Limitations include:
- Survey was only conducted among current, active divers who frequent scuba-related websites
- More than half of the respondents were from ScubaBoard
- The remainder of respondents were obtained from the survey being shared by divers on social media-
- Most of the social sharing of the survey skewed towards experienced tech/wreck/cold water divers
- In short, the methodology skewed heavily away from average recreational/warm-water divers
Artifacts caused by those limitations can be seen in the first few questions below, where you'll notice that respondents skew older, very experienced, and highly-certified. (More than 20% of respondents were Instructors.) Further, the results obviously contain few non-divers and likely zero "former" divers.
Many folks were confused/perplexed by a few of the questions, how they were worded, or simply wondered what "the purpose of the survey" was. The purpose was just to sort of poke around a bit to see what I could find. I do have a hypothesis that certain beliefs/perceptions held about scuba diving are highly variable. The specific methodology, analytics, and interpretation behind a few of the questions is proprietary in nature but I've included the straight-up responses here as well. Will be interesting to see what sort of conclusions people draw from the responses.
With that as introduction, here are the answers to the questions...
I look forward to the discussion - thanks again to everyone who took part!
Ray
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