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Invitation to participate in the Psychedelics User Survey

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entheogenstudy

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Dear Nexians,
I would like to recruit you to participate (and maybe beta test) the Psychedelics User Survey, which is a research project run from the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen. The link to the survey is: https://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=2VAVFK31J212

The survey is completely anonymous: it does not ask for any identifying information and does not store your IP address or any other Internet data. The survey provider, SurveyXact, has an agreement with the university that it will conform to the strict new GDPR privacy regulation that you have probably heard about. If you are still in doubt about your privacy, the survey has been tested to work with the Tor browser at the “standard” and “safer” levels, but not at the “safest” level, which disables forms. I see no reason why it should not work via a VPN. In order to participate, you must be at least 18 years old, have a good understanding of English, and have experience with one commonly used psychedelic.

I have previously interviewed people here at the Nexus about their experiences with psychedelics, and this has resulted in an article about microdosing (which you can read at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1455072517753339), and one article about entheogenic spirituality (read at https://www.researchgate.net/public...tivated_Entheogen_Use_among_Modern_Westerners). Because I was impressed by the many good qualities of the Nexus population, I am pre-launching the Psychedelics User Survey exclusively on this site. What I hope is that some of you will take the time to complete the survey, and then tell me what you think about it in this thread. Is there something that confused or annoyed you? Did the given responses to some questions fail to describe your experience? Did you find a bug or spelling error? Would you like to suggest new questions for the survey?

In the survey, you will be asked about your usage pattern and motivations for use for one psychedelic, as well as for cannabis. You will also be asked to characterize your most meaningful psychedelic experience, a typical experience, and your worst experience (maybe a bad trip, or maybe just your least interesting trip). Finally, you are asked to judge the long-term consequences of your use of this psychedelic.

I hope you will give it a go, and also keep this thread alive with on-topic comments and suggestions.

The link to the survey is: https://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=2VAVFK31J212

Thanks for your attention :)
 
Thanks for putting this together, I gladly took part in it.

As someone who has significant professional experience in survey programming and data processing, allow me to chime in with several improvement suggestions.

1. It's good practice to include a plausi-check logic in the survey that prevents the respondent from selecting two answers that logically contradict each other (or alternatively give them a warning that they've selected an answer pair that has a logic contradiction and let the confirm their selection before moving on), as seem in the picture below:
2VIBQvz

The plausi-check should work on response sets such as Love-Hate, Sadness-Joy etc.

2. As seen in the pic below, you ask the respondent which substances have they used in the past, and allow them to specify for how long. However the respondent is then allowed to select a substance from the second question that they have said they've never used in the first one. The second question should have a response filter that shows only responses that aren't coded as "Never" in the first question, which means that either the second question has to be asked on the next page, or has to have javascript embedded that dynamically hides responses that are coded as "Never" in the first question).
2Ilh6qB


3. The question seen on the below snapshot is basically redundant. You already have that information that you can determine from the above two questions - you pick the substance the respondent wishes to answer about and you see how many times they've used it in the question before that. If you insist on having that question, you need to add a response validation logic that checks if the response they've given to this question matches the response they've given on the question that asks them which substances have they tried (and how many times).
2IkE7de


4. It is good practice to add a response "No notable/significant consequences" or something of the sort to all questions similar to the one seen below:
2Ij7HjA


I hope that was helpful and aids you into getting a better understanding on the numerous positive benefits that go along with psychedelics. People like you are on the frontier of making psychedelics more open to the public in a safe, reliable and medically significant way.

If anything from my feedback is unclear, or you need some more advice/assistance with this survey, reach out to me in PMs or here in this post and I'll help out to make it a perfect survey.

Be well, much love. :love:
 
Thanks everybody for answering the survey :)

Loveall:
Lion's mane has cognitive enhancement effect and could probably count as a nootropic. For the purposes of the survey, the important thing is probably more about whether you think that you are taking a nootropic or not. I wonder if psychedelics users who also use nootropics are different from psychedelics users who don't use nootropics, and if so in what ways... :)

Nydex:
Thank you very much for your suggestions. Some of the issues you raised are ones that I have been thinking about myself, so it's interesting that you too identified them as things to be aware of. I will give my take on them item by item, and you can see if you agree. Everybody else feel free to chime in.

1. The survey system does provide a validation function, but I haven't used it (yet?) because I thought there were other ways to get at this. For emotional characteristics of experiences, it seemed to me that psychedelic experiences are often very complex and changing. So maybe one moment there is a deep joy, and then it moves into something fearful and maybe tinged with sadness before ending in a state of peace and love... You get the idea. So maybe it is good to leave room for all this complexity and contradiction?

2. I agree that it would be better in many ways to remove the never-used psychedelics from the bottom list, but it was complicated and I thought it might also be interesting to check this later. If a respondent has picked a psychedelic for the survey that they previously indicated they had no experience with, this probably says something about their precision in filling in the survey. Maybe I can even use this as a measure of error in the overall data?

3. I know that I am asking people the same question twice here, and I hope no one gets offended by this. However, I did not remove this question on purpose, and basically for the same reason as outlined above. If people pick a different option here than they did above, and especially if there is a large discrepancy, I feel that says something interesting about them. (doesn't it?)

4. Totally agree with this one. How about if I change it to "No consequences / Some positive and some negative consequences for life and health" ?

Peace and love :)
 
Check out my answers below in cyan.

entheogenstudy said:
Thanks everybody for answering the survey :)

Loveall:
Lion's mane has cognitive enhancement effect and could probably count as a nootropic. For the purposes of the survey, the important thing is probably more about whether you think that you are taking a nootropic or not. I wonder if psychedelics users who also use nootropics are different from psychedelics users who don't use nootropics, and if so in what ways... :)

Nydex:
Thank you very much for your suggestions. Some of the issues you raised are ones that I have been thinking about myself, so it's interesting that you too identified them as things to be aware of. I will give my take on them item by item, and you can see if you agree. Everybody else feel free to chime in.

1. The survey system does provide a validation function, but I haven't used it (yet?) because I thought there were other ways to get at this. For emotional characteristics of experiences, it seemed to me that psychedelic experiences are often very complex and changing. So maybe one moment there is a deep joy, and then it moves into something fearful and maybe tinged with sadness before ending in a state of peace and love... You get the idea. So maybe it is good to leave room for all this complexity and contradiction? [Nydex: Yeah I totally understand what you mean. An awesome way to work with such contradicting data would be to show a new question on the next page that would basically say something like "You picked <count> contradicting emotions in the previous question. Can you please let us know what was the ratio between them?". Next you could take for example a contradictory pair they selected (say Joy-Sadness) and present it as a slider with Joy on the left-hand side and Sadness on the right-hand side and ask them to move the slider to represent the ratio of those two emotions. The data from this type of question is usually saved as numeric with a range from 1 (being the emotion on the left) to 10 (being the emotion on the right). If the platform you use doesn't have sliders you could ask separate questions for each contradictory pair and make them select "Emotion A was predominant" or "Emotion B was predominant" or "Both emotions were equally strong" or something of the sort. There are many other ways you can formulate such a question, the possibilities are literally limited only by the capabilities of the platform you use for this survey.]

2. I agree that it would be better in many ways to remove the never-used psychedelics from the bottom list, but it was complicated and I thought it might also be interesting to check this later. If a respondent has picked a psychedelic for the survey that they previously indicated they had no experience with, this probably says something about their precision in filling in the survey. Maybe I can even use this as a measure of error in the overall data? [Nydex: Albeit this is totally true, you might slim down your sample by ~40% by doing such manual validation checks. Going with the integrated validation logic that the platform has you will ensure a decent sample response rate and a balanced, errorless data spread across these questions.]

3. I know that I am asking people the same question twice here, and I hope no one gets offended by this. However, I did not remove this question on purpose, and basically for the same reason as outlined above. If people pick a different option here than they did above, and especially if there is a large discrepancy, I feel that says something interesting about them. (doesn't it?) [Nydex: Same as the above comment. ]

4. Totally agree with this one. How about if I change it to "No consequences / Some positive and some negative consequences for life and health" ? [Nydex: Well you already have "Some positive and some negative..." so maybe just add a "No notable/significant consequences" as the last option and make sure you're giving the respondent all possible choices here. ]

Peace and love :)
Click to expand...

I've never worked with SurveyXact, but I doubt they're that different from Decipher or any other powerful survey tool (although Decipher is one of the most versatile and powerful survey tools on the market). If you need some assistance with filtering out some responses or anything else, let me look at the script behind the survey and maybe I can suggest something.

Finally my professional knowledge is useful to someone...I never thought I'd live to see that day lol 😁

Be well, my friend. :love:
 
Thanks for your thoughts Nydex :)

There is no direct script access actually - I have to modify it via the grahpic interface.

Why do you think the manual validation will slim down the sample by 40% ? That sounds like a lot..

I changed the line we've been talking about (#4) - the thing was that I wanted to combine the no consequences option and the mixed option since they are both a kind of neutral option.
 
entheogenstudy said:
Why do you think the manual validation will slim down the sample by 40% ? That sounds like a lot..
Click to expand...
Well to be honest I applied the large scale survey data tendencies to this survey, and that is kind of pointless since it won't be that big of a data sample probably (sub 200 respondents maybe?). In larger scales when you omit the validation and just terminate the respondent at some further point because of a conflicting set of responses they gave to a part of the survey that tends to cut off a big chunk of the data you have, because most people that fill out the surveys I work with are either people who do it in an extreme hurry just so they can get it done, or just people that really don't give a damn about the survey or cause they're contributing to and just blindly click responses and hope the survey ends soon, if you get what I mean.

Given the type of respondents you're getting for this survey (i.e. the Nexians) you probably won't encounter faulty or bunk data in your survey, unless someone's doing it while high on some substance 😁

entheogenstudy said:
I changed the line we've been talking about (#4) - the thing was that I wanted to combine the no consequences option and the mixed option since they are both a kind of neutral option.
Click to expand...
Ok, that works too if it fits your needs and vision.

Take care! :thumb_up:
 
I'm kind of hoping for 500-1000 respondents in total, although here at the Nexus I am happy with 50.

Barely half of that so far, so to those who haven't answered it please consider taking the time. It should only take about 15-20 minutes..
 
Great :)
I appreciate it

And: do you actually use 15-20 minutes on filling this out, as I imagine?

Nothing that confuses or annoys? :)
 
Thanks for your input, Sunnyside :)

I will try to revive this thread every now and then, so that people who haven't seen it yet might take notice and perhaps contribute their 15 minutes to expand our understanding of psychedelics use.

Please don't be afraid to report in this thread anything with the survey that somehow annoyed you or did not work. Don't be shy :)
 
Dear Nexians,

Welcome back from your summer holidays!

Many people have already taken this survey, and thanks a lot for that, but if some of you missed it back in April-May and would like to participate I will keep it open for another week (until Sep 1). So this is last call :)

The link to the survey is: https://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=2VAVFK31J212

Please only answer the survey once. Again thanks to everybody!
 
Thanks :)

Close to 50 from the Nexus now, and almost 350 altogether from eight different communities. It should be enough for most analyses, and will definitely keep me busy with statistics software for a few months :)
 
entheogenstudy said:
Hi all,

The survey is now closed. Thanks to everybody who participated!

If you are interested, you can find a report with basic descriptive statistics from participants recruited from the DMT Nexus at this link:

I will get back to you with analyses and article drafts later :)
Click to expand...
Awesome study!

Thank you for sharing this, since no logs are kept on the DMT-Nexus server it is nice to finally see some statistics about our demography! :thumb_up:


Kind regards,

The Traveler
 

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