Beyond Reality discussion

I wanted to pass this along. The discussion on twitter has been really interesting, and the more people fill out this survey the better!

Mary Robinette Kowal posted this on her website:
So there’s this really good conversation going on in Twitter about encouraging Diversity in SFF. The hashtag is #DiversityInSFF and I highly encourage checking it out. Anyway, reading that and thinking about the other conversations, I started wondering who the fans of speculative fiction are? I mean, I know who goes to conventions, but what about everyone else?
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/readingsf

I do not, mostly because life gets in the way. I have been to one in the 1990s.

I think the survey is looking for those answers. Who goes, and why, and who doesn't?

I answered the same thing there, as well.

Some design problems there, I think. Here are some I spotted:

- having options called things like "I like this" and "this is also good" (on the 'pick three' questions) - far from clear that people will interpret these in the same way (eg was there meant to be a ranking between those)

- dividing up genres in an overly detailed and sometimes confusing way - e.g. does everyone agree on what the difference is between "interstitial" and "slipstream"? Is 'historical fantasy' only fantasy in real history, or in alternate history, or in direct analogues of history, or anything with a strong flavour reminiscent of a historical era? (eg is A Game of Thrones 'historical fantasy' or not?)

- giving every single country in the world. Actually, two problems - first, asking where our SFF comes from makes it sound habitual, leaving it unclear how to judge. Are you asking whether I've EVER read a SFF book from Sint Maarten or the Holy See, or whether I NORMALLY read SFF from Sint Maarten or the Holy See? And is it really helpful to ask about each country individually anyway? Wouldn't you get better responses dividing countries up into zones?

- Asking about convention-going: it's bad to ask people to distinguish between going 'moderately', 'slightly' and... whatever that third option was. You're likely to get answers that reflect self-perception more than reality (eg going to four conventions a year might be going extremely often to me, never having gone to one before, but to someone else whose friends go to ten a year it might be 'slightly'). Better to give numerical answers - (eg. 'never', 'every few years', 'every year', 'several times a year', 'most months', etc).

- from an outsider's point of view, are those really the best options for gender identity? For instance, I would think that making 'MTF' and 'FTM' incompatible with either 'transgender' or 'transexual' would lead to confusion - is a male-to-female transexual to tick 'transexual' or 'male to female'? But maybe it's just that those terms have developed more specific meanings to the people they're actually relevant to. I would also note, though, that intersex conditions are biological conditions, and that people with those conditions may wish to identify as "intersex" while still identifying as either "male" or "female" as well? Or maybe not, I don't know.

- The race question is very American-skewed. The big issue with it is having 'hispanic or latino' as a race alongside 'white', since many hispanic or latino people would consider themselves both hispanic/latino AND white (and not in a mixed-race sense). In particular, I've never encountered a Spaniard who didn't consider themselves white (I mean, DUE to being Spanish, obviously some Spanish people aren't white for other reasons), and I've also talked to latin americans who considered themselves (or their compatriots) white (or black), even though they'd all be 'latino' in the USA. Even the American census, iirc, uses the term "hispanic white", rather than making people choose.
Bringing ethnicity into it is also confusing, since ethnicities (as seen in the case of latino above) don't really import well between countries, and because it makes people have to choose between their ethnicity and their race.

- it might be interesting to have a question on language, as well as one on skin colour

- just a point of pedantry: "United Kingdom" isn't a nationality!



Not trying to rubbish the idea of the survey here, just trying to make some suggestions where I thought it could be improved.

I'm sure she'd be open to your suggestions.
With regards to the question of con attendance, I think she was specifically looking for how people would self-designate on those questions. Given the discussions that sparked this, she's probably more interested in whether you think you go to a fair number of cons than how many.

As for the gender identity question, there is a wide spectrum of identities that people choose. Some people consider "FTM" a large part of their identity. Others are interested only in the end result, and would tick M. If I recall correctly, there was a box at the bottom of the list if you needed to make multiple choices or use a term that wasn't listed. This is about self-identification, again.
Good observations, in general.

I didn't see "hard sf" as an option of the type of speculative fiction a person reads. Did I miss that, or is that accurate, that she missed that one?

Catherine wrote: "I didn't see "hard sf" as an option of the type of speculative fiction a person reads. Did I miss that, or is that accurate, that she missed that one?"

It was missing. I ended up putting it under Other. Actually, the categories were a bit odd. Some areas got highly specific while other areas had large gaps.

I had trouble identifying ones which would fit my favorite books.

I found the results fascinating. Certainly shows the drift toward cyberpunk