Recruiting reddit MRAs and feminists for a social psychology study!

I appreciate that you gave me reasons for removing the thread instead of just removing it without explaining why. I actually just finished writing up a long comment to respond to some of the concerns I'm seeing in the thread, and found out the post was removed just when I was about to post it. I think that your concerns are definitely valid and I would like to address them:

  • As social psychology researchers, anonymity is extremely important and we have to demonstrate to our university's ethics board that we take care to assure participants' anonymity. This study has passed through the University of Waterloo's research ethics board. May I ask why you think anonymity may be a concern here? We do not collect any identifying information in the survey. We have no accesss to people's reddit usernames because it is an external site. The only instance where we collect identifying information is if participants are interested in entering the gift card draw, in which case, we collect their email address through a separate URL that is not linked to the study URL or study data in any way. I understand that you care about your redditors' anonymity, and want to let you know that the researchers and our university care about that as well.

If you have further concerns about the issue of anonymity, please feel free to discuss with me further (or if you'd prefer to talk to someone who isn’t directly involved in the study, I could forward the contact information for my university's research ethics officer, whose information is also in the information-consent page of the study).

  • May I ask why you think I have a clearly biased position, other than some comments on the thread about what people think is my position? It’s ironic, because it wasn’t long ago that r/mensrights was praising my other research and started a lively discussion about it (https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/2sh2i5/study_men_who_treat_women_the_same_as_they_treat/). It’s funny because some of the feminist subreddits I posted to removed my post... perhaps they think I am biased towards MRAs. I think it is silly to think “Oh, feminists/MRAs liked this study... the researcher must be biased!” It is my hope and my goal that people on both sides of the debate would see the value in this study. I didn’t spend a month working on the study materials and website so that I could produce a biased study. It would reflect quite poorly on me as a researcher to conduct clearly biased studies and publish clearly biased results. It was actually the responses from the thread that drew me to reddit and encouraged me to do a study looking at MRAs’ and feminists’ attitudes.** I think this is an important and interesting study because there has been no research done on MRA identification and attitudes. I think that both MRA and feminist groups are guilty of picking the worst examples of each other when challenging the validity of opposing views and it seems that all we have in the media are caricatures, which is another reason why I want to examine what MRAs and feminists’ attitudes really are. Anyway, I understand that there are some concerns in the thread about my position, but there are also very positive comments I received via email and the study’s comment box from MRAs who have completed the study. I just got an email from a self-identified MRA who finished my study who said that they enjoyed the study and would like to participate in any future studies I have. There are MRAs and feminists who like the research, and there are MRAs and feminists who do not. It is not my goal or intention to promote any agenda – I am a researcher first and foremost and I’m trying to get some answers.

  • You are right in that there is no way to assure that people in the study are indeed MRAs or who they say they are. And I understand that there's been history of feminists and MRAs trolling each other on reddit. However, is that really a reason not to conduct research on this topic, given how important it is to examine what people really think and moving beyond stereotypes of MRAs and feminists? The researchers are fully aware of the possibility of trolling (this is reddit, after all). We have measures in place to screen for invalid responses, patterned response, and extreme outliers. So far I haven’t seen a problem in the responses we’ve already collected, and I am very encouraged by comments from both MRAs and feminists who say that they have enjoyed the study and look forward to the results. Will there be trolls? There might be. But will there be more trolls than actual participants in the study? Almost certainly not. As researchers, it would not be beneficial for us to ignore any methodological issues in data collection and it is definitely something we will screen for before analyzing data. I’m not sure what more I could say, other than the fact that we are fully aware it could be an issue and are keeping an eye on it. So far, it hasn’t been a problem.

Again, I appreciate that you explained your concerns and reasons for removing the thread. I would be happy to discuss this further (and to show you the long response I wrote to address some of the concerns/comments in the thread... just didn’t include here so I don’t bombard you with text). I really hope that you would reconsider restoring the post.

/r/MensRights Thread