AITA for asking you to participate in a Cornell survey to study community norms and participation in r/AmItheAsshole?
[To be clear, this is a legit call for participation in an academic study, but I also need to follow the rules of the community, which is to make sure the title starts with "AITA" and to include details about why I might be the asshole, which I've added at the end of the post. The mods know I'm doing this as you can see from the pinned post—I promise I'm not trying to sneak my survey in under the radar!]
We are a group of researchers at Cornell University who are working with the mods of r/AmItheAsshole on a survey that will help us understand the relationship between community norms, technology, and participation. We are posting this to invite you to take the survey, which you can access here:
https://cornell.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aUYNy2u3XKLPNgq
The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete and will ask questions about your participation patterns in r/AmItheAsshole, why you participate(d), your perception of its community norms, your experience with algorithmically generated content and recommender systems, and demographic questions. We will not ask you for personally identifiable information. The survey has been approved by Cornell’s IRB: IRB0149466.
**Please note:** We have been using multiple recruitment methods to help us reach as many people as possible so that we can ensure that our results are valid. That means we have been randomly sampling people who have participated in the community (including people who have had posts removed and been banned), and we have also taken out ads targeted to users of r/AmItheAsshole. **If you have already completed that survey, you do not need to do it again.** It is the same survey, and we thank you for your participation.
We are particularly interested in hearing your feedback if you are just a lurker. It’s hard to capture the perspectives of lurkers and you are also an integral part of online communities.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to me on Reddit via DM, email sag284@cornell.edu, or in this thread. Or, you can contact Cornell’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) for Human Participants at https://researchservices.cornell.edu/offices/IRB.
We will share survey results on r/AmItheAsshole and our website at citizensandtech.org.
[Why I might be the asshole: We sent a lot of unsolicited messages about our survey as part of our recruitment method. I know this is annoying for some people (because I got a few DMs telling me so). But, this recruitment method is going to allow us to draw conclusions based on actual participation behaviour rather than recollections, which are not always accurate, so the data we collect for the subreddit will be higher quality. AITA?].