We developed a short chess player opinion survey at the following site:
http://home.comcast.net/~zugz/
I welcome your survey response. If you consider the survey worthwhile, I would appreciate you forwarding its link to others or posting it where others can find out about it.
Sincerely,
Chris Roberts
Southern California Chess Federation, Former President
Thanks to all of those that have taken my chess player survey! It is still open for those that have not taken it yet. To make the results as meaningful and representative as possible I would appreciate it if you would forward this note to other chess players you know. Or, print out this e-mail and post at your local club.
FYI, the response has been pretty good so far. I have over 150 responses from 30 states in the U.S. and also responses from The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Brazil, Canada, The Dominican Republic, and Norway.
For those of you in the Los Angeles area, please see the nice write up on the survey in the May 30th LA Times chess column by IM Jack Peters. I am hoping the story gets picked up by other newspapers so that we can reach a braoder audience, e.g., those that are not heavy internet users. If you can help spread the word by posting the link to my survey, I would appreciate it.
Special thanks to the SoCal Chess Federation and the Mississippi Chess Association for posting a plug on their sites mcachess.org, respectively. If others could post references on their sites that would be appreciated.
Warm Wishes,
Chris Roberts
Southern California Chess Federation, Former President
Again, the chess player survey is at http://home.comcast.net/~zugz/
Preliminary results of the chess player survey are here Chess Player Survey. 301 responses were collected. Results include crosstables by rating group for each question, perspecitive from IM Jack Peters, and insightful comments from about 70 respondents.
The survey is still open if you have not participated but would like to.
Sincerely,
Some have asked when we plan to close the survey down, and one person
suggested we not publish the results (because some questions might not have been worded correctly) and consider this a pilot.
We debated whether to shut the survey down when we published the preliminary results. But, we decided that the act of publishing preliminary results might induce more folks to take the survey. In fact, that is what happened and we have received about 50 more responses. So, for now the survey remains open and responses continue to trickle in from all over the U.S. and places like Italy, New Zealand, and Australia.
On the issue of validity of the results v. calling it a pilot and not
publishing results. Of course there are improvements to be made and some questions are probably better worded than others. However, we do plan to publish results so that others can draw what conclusions they will about the results such as they are. We hope to get it in print so it can be documented for posterity.
Some have noted that the results about scholastic players liking money over trophies are interesting, but keep in mind that the sample size is small. An organizer of big tournaments in the U.S. noted this result so it will be interesting if we see fallout at events. Also, I made an appeal to some scholastic contacts for more scholastic responses but have not heard back. If anyone else has a scholastic club they can survey, that might help with the validity of results for the 17 years old and less group.
This is not a for-profit effort so the validity is only as good as the
efforts by those that help out on their own time with constructing
questions, taking the survey, or analyzing the raw data. We have had help on a number of fronts and I really appreciate all of it. I view the
constructive criticisms on the questions as a good thing. A vetting process.
A “pilot” has the connotation of being a warm-up for the real thing. This
has been an interesting exercise and quite a bit of work. Most have been
very supportive but a few have been skeptical of our motives or unwilling to get the word out. We had hoped to get mentioned in, e.g., TWIC, Chess Life, or on the ChessBase web page but that did not happen that I know of. This frankly was disappointing. Perhaps this kind of effort does not have broad interest in the minds of some.
At this point we are not sure if we will undertake another edition of the
survey. Do others want to see more, e.g., a 2005 chess player survey?
PS. The “By Rating” results table for question 24 were incorrect and has
been updated on my web site.