This is a guest post from Peter Chen, who is studying how people use the internets.
This is a voluntary survey being undertaken by Dr Peter John Chen of the Department of Government at the University of Sydney.
I’m writing to ask for a favour. I’m currently working on a book on Australian politics and new media. As part of this I want to do a small study of blog readers, using comparative data from explicitly political and not explicitly political blogs. As such, I’m contacted a few of the more highly ranked blogs to see if they’d be interested in participating, and Hoyden About Town agreed to post my call for participants.
The survey is open to readers of the blog who live in Australia. The survey will be used in a forthcoming (2012) book on the internet and Australia.
The survey will take only 10 minutes of your time, and all responses are anonymous and confidential.
The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Australian_blog_readers
Hoyden About Town bloggers will have access to a summary of the initial findings, and may choose to post the summary on the blog.
Thanks for considering this request.
Hoyden About Town 
This seems to be mostly a good survey. I was pretty bamboozled by the phrasing of question 10:
I’ve just offered some feedback to the author by email, as there was no option to do so in the survey, along the lines of an Other option for this question. Being mindful of your safety or your child’s safety in a situation where you’re trapped with a potentially dangerous stranger, or needing to conserve spoons on a long trip, doesn’t mean you “wouldn’t think it worth your while”.
I was a bit confused by that post as well – however I went with talking because I have been known to pick up random small-talk comments where people refer to larger issues and then have debates while on the train. :p
I also thought the question about the person looking for a parking space and the rude pedestrian was strange – I couldn’t think of one. Surely it’s the pedestrian’s rudeness above all?
Jo, I had the same response to the pedestrian thing, and said so seeing as it was a type anything reply box for that one.
I didn’t answer the train question, both because neither answer applied to how I would respond and I thought it was very loaded, both for all the reasons Lauredhel says, and because you might think that’s rude or inappropriate in that context.
I thought the pedestrian thing was problematic not just because I couldn’t think of one, but it’s not clear what it measures. I am guessing they are asking ‘what political party disgusts you’, but think that is too loaded so are reframing it to be about someone else’s disgust. But, I reckon that question could be interpreted in multiple ways by a reader. So that, you might actually think what party would rude people hate; or, you could see the badge-wearing person as a victim, and so associate the answer with a party you like. Given that it is so subjective, what does it really measure?
I’m having a chuckle here, as I had the same response to both the train question and the pedestrian question. Didn’t answer the train question; wrote a response in the pedestrian question box (which included questioning the country we were talking about 🙂 which actually was honestly my first thought, possibly because I have been reading so much about USA politics recently).
The pedestrian question was bizarre.