Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Enhancement Scenario:
While the majority of respondents believed that
Oscar Pistorius should not be able to compete with able-bodied athletes, the
reasons behind “Yes,” “No,” and “Neutral” responses varied widely (5). Rea-
sons included the biomechanics of sprinting, comparison with other assistive
devices, visibility of the prostheses, passivity of the device, Pistorius' skill,
perceptions of fairness, and Pistorius' ability to inspire and attract viewers.
9.3.2 Self-Documentation
The survey is “self-documenting,” meaning that both the quantitative and
qualitative results are generated by the survey itself, thereby making the anal-
ysis both rapid and accurate. Immediate results can be obtained and updated
as more users complete the survey. The results of both the Evaluation scenario
and the Enhancement scenario can be found in Appendix
2
and the results
from all 14 questions can be retrieved directly from the
yourviews
website [
3
].
9.4 Discussion
9.4.1 Survey Design
Each of the NERD surveys is an experiment in a broad sense, dependent on
having enough voluntary participants. In a stronger sense, however, NERD
also experiments on new methods in most surveys, aiming to improve our
platform incrementally. In this survey, we added voting for multiple reasons as
well as the modified popularity display ranking described above. We evaluate
each of these innovations as a success. There were no complaints about the
voting (as there had been in an earlier single vote survey) and our display
method does mitigate the primacy effect as intended [
4
].
Finally, NERD conducted an experiment in the stronger sense of a ran-
dom partition by dividing the population into two cohorts showing reasons
identified by authors' pseudonyms or only by reason numbers. A preliminary
analysis of these data suggests two small effects: first, those respondents who
saw authors' pseudonyms contributed more reasons; second, they contributed
more votes of “Yes” and less of “No,” while neutral votes remained about
the same. We are presently conducting further experiments on ways of linking
authors and reasons, which we hope will help explain these differences.
9.4.2 Survey Content
Some questions produced clear agreement (2A, 2B, 3A, 4B), while others
did not. One particularly useful element of the survey was the exploration
