Are introductory fellowships and other courses run by local EA groups considered under “educational courses” or does that mean things like philosophy classes, where EA might be mentioned as a concept?
There are two different things to consider here:
People’s response to the main question about where they heard about EA, which was a selection from a fixed list. So this just means the respondent selected “Educational course (e.g., lecture, class, MOOC)”, with no additional classification from us.
Their responses to the open comment follow-up question asking for more detail: the majority of these (>75%) refer to a university course or the Singer MOOC.
In most cases where someone joins EA through an activity run by their EA group, they’ll select EA Group. I went through references to “group” in the comments for those who did not select EA Group and most (23/36) were not referring to an EA Group, 3 referred to a friend referring them to a group, 2 referred to seeing an ad for a group, 5 mentioned something else first introducing them to EA but a group being useful for them beginning to seriously engage and the rest were miscellaneous/uncategorisable. I went through comments of those who did select EA Group and 9/111 (8%) mentioned a fellowship. You can see a more detailed analysis of comments by those who selected EA Group in 2020 here, where 7% mentioned a fellowship, but a larger number mentioned an event or fresher’s fair.
Alternatively, would it be possible to ask for country-specific data analysis?
For Estonia, there are not very clear differences (p=0.023). This is from n=37 for Estonia, so we should not be very confident about the differences.
There are two different things to consider here:
People’s response to the main question about where they heard about EA, which was a selection from a fixed list. So this just means the respondent selected “Educational course (e.g., lecture, class, MOOC)”, with no additional classification from us.
Their responses to the open comment follow-up question asking for more detail: the majority of these (>75%) refer to a university course or the Singer MOOC.
In most cases where someone joins EA through an activity run by their EA group, they’ll select EA Group. I went through references to “group” in the comments for those who did not select EA Group and most (23/36) were not referring to an EA Group, 3 referred to a friend referring them to a group, 2 referred to seeing an ad for a group, 5 mentioned something else first introducing them to EA but a group being useful for them beginning to seriously engage and the rest were miscellaneous/uncategorisable. I went through comments of those who did select EA Group and 9/111 (8%) mentioned a fellowship. You can see a more detailed analysis of comments by those who selected EA Group in 2020 here, where 7% mentioned a fellowship, but a larger number mentioned an event or fresher’s fair.
For Estonia, there are not very clear differences (p=0.023). This is from n=37 for Estonia, so we should not be very confident about the differences.