Scuba Diving Survey Results

[fjpatrum]

Not having read all the responses in this thread, I thought the whole concept of the poll was to determine the nature of experience versus "nerves" in SCUBA. Personally, I find it exhilarating and calming at the same time. I treated all the "experience" or "adventure" questions as opposites and answered all in the "experience" realm rather than "adventure". While I like adventure I treated the poll as if that was a negative connotation, rather than a positive one and the "experience" as a positive connotation.

In reality I see SCUBA as both an adventure (seeing new and sometimes exciting things) and an experience that I hope to share (during and after) and relive when I look back at particular dives.

I've been "nervous" on exactly one dive and I wrote about it here on scubaboard. It was my first thumbed dive. I assumed the poll was looking for a way to correlate that level of nervousness to either mindset (about adventure versus experience) or actual dive experience.

I saw the age questions as just a way to see if there was any further correlation with demographics in mind. Given I know you are in marketing, I assumed this had something to do with how you might market some scuba related business or product.

 

[flots am]

The sample is certainly skewed toward professional divers . . . but I have read a number of things over the last couple of years that suggest that, in fact, the average age of scuba divers IS going up, so the age graph you have may actually represent what is happening.

My completely non-scientific observation of tropical vacation diving validates the age distribution. The boats always have a bunch of people from middle-age and older, although the "number of dives" doesn't seem to be accurate (or maybe just not useful). There are always a significant number of people who have trouble assembling gear and are absolute disasters when starting the dive, making lots of "brand new diver" mistakes.

Local (cold water northeast) diving is quite different, with a much wider age distribution and almost no problems with gear or diving. this is probably because the local diving is both much more accessible and difficult, so the people who put in the effort to become qualified, tend to dive a lot more frequently and for more of the year.

flots.

 

[Lorenzoid]

Why do you say that? I'm trying to avoid the temptation to "pontificate" on the results. I have encourraged people to discuss what they think the results mean. The best instructors/mentors I've ever had have "told me where to look, but not told me what to see."

Take your brain out for a spin... look at the responses and tell what you see. There are differences between the answers to some questions, so there is certainly more than "nothing" there for anyone who cares to look.

I can assure you I take something very intersting away from it. If you'd like to give it some thought and contribute to the discussion, that'd be great. If you want to huff off because you don't see a silver bullet presented to you on a platter, that's fine too. (Come back in about a week, I'm not good at resisting the temptation to pontificate for long.)

I was only referring to that one question about "adventure versus experience," because it intrigued me. I had hoped to hear why YOU chose those words as opposed to various others that people might use to describe diving. Yes, I get it that you were not looking for anything in particular. But surely there was some reason you chose those words.

 

[RJP]

. Give it up. You are unqualified, even in connection with this kind of crude subliminal manipulation.

Thanks for the insight. I'll let my clients know that an anonymous stranger on the internet who doesn't understand what I was trying to do has an opinion about my qualifications which is in stark contrast to their actual experience of working with me over the last 25yrs, and in fact this anonymous stranger's opinion is also contrary to the top industry publications recognition of my shop as "Ad Agency of The Year" three times in the last five years (I won't know until April whether we won again this year) and gave my teams more gold awards last year for individual campaigns than any other ad agency in the US.

We'll all just have to figure out how to soldier-on after this revelation.

:d

 

[drrich2]

This results in a test of little more than two key words: which word is more frequently associated with diving experiences?

I've been struggling with this for a couple of days. Finally might be ready to take a crack at it. First off, the lack of clarity between the 2 might be an advantage, drawing on people's less conscious motives to answer rather than providing a stark contrast that they might answer based on how they think they ought to think. In other words, there's a difference between why people do things, and why they like to think they do them, and sometimes questions that aren't so clear can help draw the former out.

By my own understanding (as in I'm too lazy to look it up, plus most people wouldn't), 'Adventure' implies going somewhere new, and experiencing something new. If I said I was going on an adventure, people would assume I was traveling somewhere, likely (but not always) somewhere I hadn't been before.

Practical Application of Adventure to prospective diver: Where will scuba diving take me?

I take Experience to be more about the subjective perception of something one undergoes. It can be new, but an 'experience' I can more easily see being repeated. After all, one could call sex an experience, and lots of people like to repeat that.

Practical Application of Experience to prospective diver: How will scuba diving make me feel?

It's easy to assume that the Adventure leads to the Experience, but they are actually different things.

People taking exotic tropical trips to new Caribbean islands, particularly those more 'off the beaten path,' are going on adventures.

People repetitively local diving wrecks in the Great Lakes, or off the east coast of New Jersey, etc..., are pursuing an experience they enjoy, even though having done it a few times there's less of an adventure.

I did not look back at RJP's stat.s or the sample demographic to try to 'go deeper.' Just sharing my thoughts on how this might break out.

Hey, it's been 2 days and that's the best I could come up with.

Richard.

 

[flots am]

People taking exotic tropical trips to new Caribbean islands, particularly those more 'off the beaten path,' are going on adventures.

People repetitively local diving wrecks in the Great Lakes, or off the east coast of New Jersey, etc..., are pursuing an experience they enjoy, even though having done it a few times there's less of an adventure.

I never really thought of SCUBA as an adventure.

That doesn't mean it isn't sold and promoted as an adventure, just that it never actually seemed to be one. An actual adventure always seems to have at least a little danger involved. SCUBA is only dangerous if you do it wrong.

Even when going to a brand new tropical island, and seeing new stuff and meeting new people, it's always seemed more like "fun and interesting" than "Adventure." Maybe my definition is just different.

flots.

 

[RJP]

I was only referring to that one question about "adventure versus experience," because it intrigued me. I had hoped to hear why YOU chose those words as opposed to various others that people might use to describe diving. Yes, I get it that you were not looking for anything in particular. But surely there was some reason you chose those words.

"Adventure" was chosen based on the observation that a great many shops, agencies, resorts, and others in the industry seem to have chosen to position diving as such. Even many SBs gravitated towards that word in several recent threads as being "what the scuba industry should market itself as offering."


"Experience" was chosen for a specific reason as well. Can't get too much into the precise rationale, but suffice to say that it's largely related to the reason that many many people cited as confusing; everyone intellectually understands that they are different words with distinct and different meanings. No one has any trouble tellng me their understanding of the relationship between the two words from a rational perspective. When you are then forced to choose between the two... your rational and emotional thought processes get conflicted. For each respondent, each of their choices on the "left-to-right" scale on the last question are assigned a weighted score for each question based on what their answer was to the two previous "adventure" and "experience" questions. Which, by the way, were rotated... half of the respondents got the "diving is an adventure" question prior to seeing the "diving is an experience" question. The other half were exposed to those questions in the flipped order.


The analysis we do on the responses is based on the relationship between the answers - and weighted scores - for each question, for each respondent - and allows us to determine how strong each respondent ACTUALLY holds a given belief, which is often different than how strong they may REPORT that they hold the belief. And in fact, it can sometimes reveal that your ACTUAL belief is different than what even YOU think you believe.


We can then look at these beliefs/responses by cluster based on age, number of dives, cert level, etc. and any 2D or 3D combination of questions.


We can also look at how these beliefs have changed over time within each individual. by looking at how people answered questions about "when I was first certified" or the degree to which they believed they would like diving prior to certification vs "now" and comparing how correlate with other questions.


The methodology is a proprietary application of concepts from discrete choice modeling and discriminant analysis, and a fair bit more sophisticated than calculating mean, median, and mode. At least the quant jocks, econometricians, and social scientists tell me it is. The committee that awarded McFadden his Nobel Prize in economics in 2000 for his pioneering work in the area would seem to agree. Perhaps they are qualified... ?


http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/2000/mcfadden-lecture.pdf


Choice modelling - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


New York University/Statistics and Data Analysis

 

[agilis]

Thanks for the insight. I'll let my clients know that an anonymous stranger on the internet who doesn't understand what I was trying to do has an opinion about my qualifications which is in stark contrast to their actual experience of working with me over the last 25yrs, and in fact this anonymous stranger's opinion is also contrary to the top industry publications recognition of my shop as "Ad Agency of The Year" three times in the last five years (I won't know until April whether we won again this year) and gave my teams more gold awards last year for individual campaigns than any other ad agency in the US.

We'll all just have to figure out how to soldier-on after this revelation.

:d

Wow! All I can say is that your non-anonymous and well known personality on the internet make clear your sterling qualifications to an individual who doesn't understand what you were trying to do. I foolishly had thought you were trying to determine which witless approach would appeal most effectively to the irrational impulses of new buyers, what words would be mostly likely to induce them to part with their money.

How foolish I have been. I guess I was wrong and that more positive motives than pushing sales were at play here.

I'm enormously impressed by the awards you won. I can imagine the stiff nationwide, perhaps international competition you faced.

Still, were you enrolled in any applied statistics course I taught, you might not have done as well as you did in that competition with all those Madison Avenue Agencies you bested. But what is any abstract academic exercise in comparison to the extraordinary experience and ongoing adventure involved is selling lots dry goods to many people?

Selling fantasy to consumers has always been more profitable than providing accurate information.

 

[RJP]

Richard, you show a remarkably nuanced understanding for someone who is merely "ready to take a crack at it" after ony two days. It often takes people with advanced degrees far longer to understand the gist of some of this stuff well enough to explain one of the core ideas as clearly as you did. (You may have done a better job than I did in the post I was writing at the same time.

Take a doctorate out of petty cash... uou've earned it!

 

[StefinSB]

I have issues with a "researcher" publishing results while keeping the methodologies private.