The BME Megasurvey - More InfoUsing this tool
It's not that hard; select the options on the forms and click the display button. On questions that allow you to list potential answers (ie. "to people who answered...") you must enter the full answer to ensure a match (ie. on gender, "Male" will match "Male" but "M" will not match "Male"). You may use wildcards if you'd like to both cut down on typing and to represent multiple entries (ie. on gender, "Trans*" will match all four flavors of transgender members). In addition, you may use the semi-colon to separate multiple valid answers (ie. if you wanted to match all "natural" genders but leave out eunuchs and transgender members you could use "Male; Female").
When doing a boolean search, you have three combination options. OR will combine the two lists (ie. if list one is "1, 2, 3" and list two is "2, 3, 4, 5", the output will be "1, 2, 3, 4, 5"). AND will output only the items common to both lists (ie. from the previous example, "2, 3"). AND NOT will remove any items that are on the second list from the first list (ie. from our example, only "1" will remain).
Who took this survey and how accurate is it?This survey was taken by the members of iam.bmezine.com, the community site attached the bmezine.com. BME is the largest full-spectrum body modification site in the world, and IAM is made up of many of its readers. In order to obtain an IAM page a person must be known to BME staff either by photos, writings, or purchase, so the possibilities of double-voting and so on are minimal.
People were "paid" a one month IAM access coupon, and as a result, slightly over 2% of respondents appear to have simply clicked through the survey without actually voting, resulting in an artificial increase in "prefer not to answer" responses. Control questions imply that approximately 0.3% were not voting accurately.
The more relevant issue is whether statistics regarding the IAM/BME community are applicable to the larger body modification community. With well over 50% of IAM members responding I feel secure that this survey gives a very accurate impression of this segment of the body modification subculture, I can not say with certainty the degree to which it represents pierced or tattooed people in general; in order to ensure accuracy voting was restricted to known members.
Legal and Usage InfoThis study was done specifically so people would have more valid data to use. As such, full rights are granted for any use of this data to anyone for any purpose as long as they are using less than 50% of the database in their final product. The sole condition is that any use must be accompanied by a credit to BMEZINE.COM (ie. something like "statistics provided by bmezine.com" or "according to a study commissioned by bmezine.com"). Use involving more than 50% of the dataset (ie. repackagings and so on) must be confirmed in writing.
For the purpose of citation, this study was written by Shannon Larratt and Darrin Fowler and executed in July of 2003 by BMEZINE.COM LLC and PsyberCity, Inc. in Tweed, Ontario, Canada.
Download full datasetWe are providing the full dataset as a comma separated text file, one user per line. Please be sure to read the legal/usage info above before downloading. It should also be noted that the survey results are being presented in a time-randmoized order.
The answers are represented numerically, exactly as they are listed in this reference file. For questions that have more than one potential answer, the answer will be comma-separated (ie. "3,4,6") also. Questions that went unanswered are simply listed with an answer of "0". Also, responses to question 5, 6, and 7 (location) have been removed to protect from reverse-engineering identities. The comments have also been removed.
Here's a link to a zip of the dataset: msdataset.zip.
It is important to note that this is an unfiltered dataset! You will find people who didn't fill it out properly or at all (just saying "choose not to answer" on all questions for example). You may want to remove these when you use the dataset!
Contact Us
Further inquiries regarding this tool and/or the survey may be directed to media@bmezine.com
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