Very interesting results. They seem surprisingly animal-friendly/considerate to me.
“The survey title and introduction didn’t mention objectives of the survey, except that it is about animal welfare”.
To check, could people see this before deciding whether or not to take the survey? If they could, I’d expect that to skew the participation substantially towards people who already care disproportionately about animals, or think them to be closer in capacity to humans etc.
If so, did you collect any demographic information that wasn’t filled based on quotas and can be compared to wider Dutch demographic data that might give insight into this? E.g. rates of vegetarianism? Or even if you found that survey participation was filled more quickly by women than by men, I’d take that as a relevant indication, given correlations between gender and various measurements relevant to caring about animals.
(Even if these aspects are similar to the wider population, or you only shared that it was about animal welfare later on after people signed up, I’d expect social desirability bias to influence the results somewhat.)
Participants could see the title of the survey in their mail, before opening the survey. The participants get rewarded with a small value coupon when completing the survey, so I don’t expect a pro-animal welfare selection bias. There was a question about active involvement level on animal welfare issues. Half of the respondents indicated to are not involved with animal welfare at all, 4% indicated high involvement, meaning e.g. eating no meat. Others had involvements like occasionally signing animal welfare petition. These statistics seem to be right, representative to the Belgian population. The survey was short, so not much difference between completion times. No significant differences in welfare range estimates were observed between people with more or less involvement, men or women,… Only relevant (statistically significant) difference: people with less active involvement had smaller negative estimates of broiler chicken welfare. I expect this to be a fluke, but again this indicates that the survey does not really have a pro animal welfare bias. Could be some social desirability bias, although I expect this to be small in anonymous online surveys of members of a marketing research company panel.
Very interesting results. They seem surprisingly animal-friendly/considerate to me.
“The survey title and introduction didn’t mention objectives of the survey, except that it is about animal welfare”.
To check, could people see this before deciding whether or not to take the survey? If they could, I’d expect that to skew the participation substantially towards people who already care disproportionately about animals, or think them to be closer in capacity to humans etc.
If so, did you collect any demographic information that wasn’t filled based on quotas and can be compared to wider Dutch demographic data that might give insight into this? E.g. rates of vegetarianism? Or even if you found that survey participation was filled more quickly by women than by men, I’d take that as a relevant indication, given correlations between gender and various measurements relevant to caring about animals.
(Even if these aspects are similar to the wider population, or you only shared that it was about animal welfare later on after people signed up, I’d expect social desirability bias to influence the results somewhat.)
Participants could see the title of the survey in their mail, before opening the survey. The participants get rewarded with a small value coupon when completing the survey, so I don’t expect a pro-animal welfare selection bias. There was a question about active involvement level on animal welfare issues. Half of the respondents indicated to are not involved with animal welfare at all, 4% indicated high involvement, meaning e.g. eating no meat. Others had involvements like occasionally signing animal welfare petition. These statistics seem to be right, representative to the Belgian population. The survey was short, so not much difference between completion times. No significant differences in welfare range estimates were observed between people with more or less involvement, men or women,… Only relevant (statistically significant) difference: people with less active involvement had smaller negative estimates of broiler chicken welfare. I expect this to be a fluke, but again this indicates that the survey does not really have a pro animal welfare bias. Could be some social desirability bias, although I expect this to be small in anonymous online surveys of members of a marketing research company panel.