If you run a meeting group or like to host events, you may want to try out my event format, “Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions,” which allows attendees to see each other’s (anonymous) answers to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable and rarely asked questions, and then discuss them as a group to discover what they can learn.
I’ve included the details of the event format below, including materials you can use to throw your own version of it.
Important Note: this event format requires at least ten attendees to show up (I recommend at least five males and five females) so as to avoid de-anonymizing participants. When I ran it there was about 20 people, which is close to ideal, I think.
GOALS
The goals of this event are:
- to help attendees understand each other on a deeper level (including potentially gaining some insight into human nature in general)
- to enable attendees to see how their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are similar or different to those around them on topics that typically are taboo to discuss
- to have an interesting and enjoyable time.
I got a very positive response to this event format from those who attended.
THE FORMAT IN BRIEF
- Attendees will be asked to completely honestly fill out an anonymous survey at a minimum of 24 hours before coming to the event, which will contain many controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable, and rarely asked questions.
- You’ll then compile the responses (grouping them by question in a totally anonymous way and calculating the % of people that gave each response for multiple-choice questions).
- You’ll hand out printed versions of these responses to attendees when they arrive. After the attendees have time to read through all the responses, you’ll then go question by question, having a quick group discussion about the responses to each.
- At the end, you’ll discuss as a group what you all learned from the experience.
- Finally, you’ll collect the sheets from everyone and shred them so that no one has a record of people’s private responses.
HOW TO DO IT
Step 1: Make a copy of my online survey containing taboo, controversial, and rarely asked questions (using the survey of questions I already created is the easiest option – preview all the questions here: http://bit.ly/2o5GBjq, and make a copy of the survey here: http://bit.ly/2Cm9oVH so that you can send it out). Or, if you have more time and want to customize the questions, you can crowdsource them from attendees in advance and put them on a survey platform that doesn’t record any personally identifying information (i.e., no email address, no IP address). If you plan to crowdsource questions, you should send out an anonymous survey to attendees beforehand to ask what questions they would want to be answered by other attendees (anonymously) that they would never normally be able to ask (here is my survey for collecting these questions from attendees: http://bit.ly/2BYQDvM and you can make your own copy of this survey here: http://bit.ly/2EqVszY). Once you get the questions back, you’ll turn them into another anonymous survey (where you actually ask those questions) which you will also send out to attendees before the event (being sure to give yourself plenty of time to process the responses to prepare event materials).
Step 2: Send an invite to potential attendees (sample invitation down below), including a detailed explanation of the event format (so they can knowingly opt-in rather than having it sprung on them). If you have the survey questions already, you should include them in the invite as well. Make sure to make it clear what the deadline is for fill out the survey (I recommend setting it to be at least 24 hours before the event starts so that you have time to prepare the results). Be sure to send a reminder before this deadline to increase the percent those who respond.
HOW I CONSTRUCTED THE QUESTIONS
I constructed my set of “taboo, controversial and rarely asked” questions (available at my survey link above) using the following process:
A. I crowdsourced question ideas from all the people who planned to attend the event.
B. I brainstormed additional ideas on my own that seemed like they could be interesting.
C. I then ran a study where 100 people in the U.S. on the Amazon Mechanical Turk recruitment platform were asked to answer each question anonymously. I ended up with way too many questions for the final survey.
D. I winnowed them down by reading all the responses of people on Mechanical Turk, retaining for the final survey those questions that seemed to me to produce especially interesting or surprising or discussion-worthy results (see link below for anonymous Mechanical Turk user responses if you’re interested).
PREPARING FOR THE EVENT
After you’ve received everyone’s survey responses, you’ll want to prepare handouts for each participant with all of those responses in completely anonymized form. It is critical that you never read any one individuals responses while you’re preparing the materials. Group the responses immediately by the question, and shuffle their order, so that you can only ever see the responses for all respondents as a group. This helps ensure the anonymity of every respondent. For multiple-choice questions, you should calculate the percent of people that gave each response (I put these on PowerPoint slides which I presented to the group, but you could put them right on the handouts). For free form text responses, you’ll want to have a list of all responses to each question, grouped by question. Be sure to shuffle the order so that the 1st response to each question is not the same person each time (otherwise, participants may accidentally be de-anonymized).
If you use the exact questions that I did, you can also show alongside your group’s responses, the responses from Mechanical Turk respondents, which you can find here in the anonymized form: http://bit.ly/2HgzX2s. I recommend only doing this for the multiple-choice questions, as otherwise, the handouts might become unreasonably long (expect to give at least seven pages of handouts if you have 20 attendees and you use a small font and are smart about space on the page).
OPTIONAL: USING MY PYTHON CODE TO PROCESS RESPONSES
If you use my exact survey, you can also use python code (download it here: http://bit.ly/2Hgi6su) that I wrote to make the process of preparing responses easier and prettier (you’ll need to use Python 2.7 to use it, which you can easily install on Mac or PC). You’ll also need to install the pylab and text wrap libraries (first install pip, which is a python installation system, then you can easily install these using pip). The way the code works is that it takes two input files: one has the responses from mechanical Turk workers (which is already provided for you in the folder you download, so there is nothing for you to do), and the other is the CSV file you download yourself of your attendees’ responses to the survey (you can get to this download option from the edit page for your copy of my survey, just click on data and you’ll see a download button). Place that CSV file you downloaded into the “python code” folder once you unzip the code (usually, you can unzip just by double-clicking). Then change the line of code comparisonFileToProcess=”…” within the file prettyPlotYesNo.py so that the … is replaced with the name of your CSV file. Finally, run the python file prettyPlotYesNo.py by navigating to that folder in terminal (Mac) or Cygwin (Windows) and doing:
python prettyPlotYesNo.py
It should then automatically fill the folder “figures” with all the results (including both figures and text files of qualitative responses). The skinny bars will represent the responses of mechanical Turk workers, and the thick bars will represent the responses of your attendees, so you can compare them side by side (i.e., you can see how representative your attendees’ responses were).
AT THE EVENT
Hand out printed sheets that show the responses of all the attendees to each of the questions. Give people 10 minutes or so to read them all (to form initial impressions and reactions). You may want to provide pens so that people can jot down notes as they go or mark responses that were especially interesting. When people are done, start with the first question, have everyone quickly read the responses to that single question again to remind themselves what others said (if it was a qualitative question) or have them look at the percent of people that gave each response (if it was a quantitative question), and then have a short group discussion about the responses to that question. If people are quiet, you may want to ask the room questions like:
•What was your reaction to reading people’s responses to this question?
•What surprised you about the way people answered the question?
•What patterns did you notice in people’s responses?
After a few minutes, or if people no longer seem to be engaged in the discussion, or if the discussion has gone on a tangent, move onto the next question (having everyone quickly read the responses to that next question again before discussion ensues). Repeat this until you’ve gotten through all the questions.
At the end, ask people what they feel like they learned overall from the experience of seeing attendees answers to these questions and discussing them as a group. When we ran this, people had a very positive reaction to the experience!
Be sure to collect all the handout materials back at the end and shred them. Make sure everyone knows at the beginning that they will not get to keep the sheets of people’s responses and that they should hand them back to you before leaving to protect the private responses of all attendees.
SAMPLE INVITATION TO SEND FOR THE EVENT
I’d like to invite you to an event called “Anonymous Answers to Anonymous Questions,” where you’ll get to find out the (anonymous) answers that all the other attendees have to controversial, taboo, embarrassing, uncomfortable, and rarely asked questions.
Here’s how the format works in detail. Please read these instructions carefully if you plan to attend, and let me know that you’ll be coming!
Before coming, all attendees will fill out an anonymous survey (see link below) with a bunch of controversial, taboo, or otherwise unusual questions. At the beginning of the survey, you and the other attendees will be asked to swear that you will respond completely honestly.
When you arrive at the event, you’ll get to see all the responses given by other attendees to all the questions (in a completely anonymized format). We’ll then go question by question, reviewing them together, and discuss them as a group (without knowing who gave which answer)! You will not be able to take any materials with you when they leave because they will contain the personal responses of group members.
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