<p>Hey,
I’m doing a “research project” (I use that term VERY lightly) for a course I’m taking on language and ethnicity and it would be cool if you took this survey. I didn’t design it, and frankly, I don’t think it’s done well at all. In any case, though, we only have a couple dozen respondents so far, so I’m posting it here in the hopes that some of you will go through it. It should only take you a couple of minutes.</p>
<p>I took the survey, but mind you I answered “sometimes” for almost every question…</p>
<p>I agree that the survey wasn’t constructed well. Whoever made it fails to realize that there are a ton of different accents under each category they presented. Standard American English? There’s no such thing. If you go to Boston, New York, California, and Oklahoma, you’ll get all kinds of different accents. Same with Spanish. My friend, who is from Guatemala, does not speak Spanish in the same accent as does my friend who is Spanish. I also fail to see the correlation between accents and socioeconomic class, attractiveness, etc… :</p>
<p>This survey is barely even doable. Like riku said, there is no such thing as a standard american accent, there are NUMEROUS different spanish accents, and for african american accent I have no idea what you meant-- if they are african american they probably wouldn’t have an african accent, though they could, and for all I know you mean ebonics. You are not going to get anything intelligible out of this. I hope for your sake there’s time to rewrite it, whoever did this screwed you over.</p>
<p>Did the survey change by the time I took it? When I took it, although it mentioned a “Spanish accent” once, it was “latino accent” for the following questions.</p>
<p>I thought the survey was OK, although I think there should have been an option between “sometimes” and “never,” and also a more neutral response for some of the other questions. (For example, maybe I put that I “never” want to talk to someone with an Asian American accent, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t ever want to talk to people with Asian American accents; I’m neutral. I don’t care whether the person I’m talking to has an Asian accent or not; I’m not going to go out of my way to speak with people just because they have Asian accents, but nor will I avoid talking with people just because they have Asian accents. If that makes sense.)</p>
<p>I know, it’s done very poorly, and I wouldn’t have even bothered posting it here except that someone mentioned that we didn’t have enough respondents. I had no hand in making it, and all the changes I suggested were ignored. The original wording for “Standard American Accent” was “European American Accent” and then (gag me now) “White,” but they, having learned nothing from the class, decided there was such a thing as “standard American English.” </p>
<p>And siemprecuriosa, sadly, no, it didn’t change, it says “Spanish” and then “Latino.” I suggested that they change that because it doesn’t make sense (and on a more basic level isn’t consistent with the “-American” theme of the whole survey) but the people in charge of making the survey thought it was perfectly sensible. <em>sigh</em></p>
<p>This was very confusing… Poorly done (which I know you know). It seemed like they confused “accent” with dialect a few times (An “African-American Accent” doesn’t exist but you may have meant the use of ebonics which would change the responses drastically). Additionally, the order of the first question (class, education etc) changed throughout the survey. That is bad design as it can create a bias in the data. If this had been done correctly it would have been a great survey.</p>
<p>I agree that this is poorly done for the reasons stated above…</p>
<p>But FURTHERMORE…</p>
<p>The reason why it was barely doable for me was because it was far too obvious what was going on. I marked “sometimes” for every single answer, every single time in the top category. The thing is, I might actually generally associate English accents with education, an “African American accent” (I assume you mean the use of ebonics or dialect?) with lower socioeconomic status, etc. SUBCONSCIOUSLY or on first impression. But if you want to catch me doing that, you’re going to have to construct the survey in a different way, because when I think about whether or not I should consider an accent “educated” I realize that makes no sense and I answer accordingly. What you SHOULD do is you should construct audio clips for each accent (each person should say the exact same thing, only difference is the accent). Then, you should present one audio clip per person and ask one set of questions per person (and the question should be, on a scale of 1-10 how educated does this person sound, not, does this accent sound educated). So, you’ll have to increase the number of people responding to your survey by a lot (because you’ll probably need about 10s of people per accent to deduce anything…and since you need different people for each accent you would need 100s of respondents…wouldn’t be too difficult if you stood out on a city street and just asked random folks).</p>
<p>Our original plan was to include audio clips, but there was no way to do it using surveymonkey and the people in charge of making it just refused to create a website on the university’s server and upload audio files to it. </p>
<p>@umcp: yeah, I agree – unless you’re totally oblivious to everything, you’re going to know what’s going on and thus you’ll feel like you need to throw off the survey-maker’s expectations… and my professor’s expecting us to come up with some sort of game-changing findings through this thing…haha</p>
<p>Gonna jump on the bandwagon… what the hell is Standard American English? Now, I have lived in England before and my accent is a heck of a lot more like the Brits than it is to certain places in the south. I have been to the deep south and thought I might need a translator. </p>
<p>I quit taking it half-way through because it was a pointless survey. Very, very racist as well.</p>
<p>I took your survey. I take it it was written by a non-American? An American probably wouldn’t think of just those categories, they’d probably also include California accents, various New England and New York accents, Chicago accents, etc. And the only representation the South got was the Texas accent? There are like fifty different Southern accents.</p>
<p>Nope, it was written by Americans (and I’m going to reiterate for the 50th time that I wasn’t among them, haha). Yeah, I’m totally against the idea “Standard English” as well. Not only is it vague and unnecessarily inclusive, it trivializes other dialects of American English (and their speakers). I think the main reason that it says " Southern (Texas)" (or whatever the hell they ended up writing) is because we were going to include audio samples before we learned that that was impossible, and there’s a guy in my class who has a very pronounced East Texan accent who was going to provide the recording…</p>