I'd like to thank everyone for responding - both to the survey itself and to this thread with your comments.
For the record I will note that I am a man.
I appreciate everyone's comments criticising and defending my study. While Wren's points about being asked to choose a single activity are valid, so are the responses he/she has received; the fact is, no one would complete a survey asking detailed questions about every single activity in the list. The list is merely to give some ideas about what types and numbers of activities gifted kids participate in; the main purpose of the survey is to take a sample of such activities and research opinions of those.
The type of activity may make a big difference in each individual case, but over a large enough sample you arrive at generalizable patterns. For example, thus far I am seeing the strongest patterns in the differences between children’s and parents’ perceptions of the most common and most important benefits of these activities.
In terms of selection criteria, sending the message out on this forum is far from the only thing I've done, and each vehicle I've used to get responses has been chosen because I knew I would get respondents who fit the criteria for giftedness
stated at the beginning of the survey. Anyone who does not fit those criteria should not be taking the survey. Of course I can’t be certain that people are not lying about fitting the criteria, but I can’t be certain they’re not lying about anything else either - the potential for dishonesty is part of the game in the social sciences.
Also, I did not change the survey questions after I posted my initial message, Wren. If there were new questions popping up on you, your computer must not have loaded the survey properly the first time.
And finally, g2mom is correct; this is a qualitative, preliminary survey, aimed primarily at identifying avenues in need of deeper research that I cannot begin to realize given that I am not currently teaching in a school
or associated with an academic institution (I finished my MA in December and will start my PhD in August), and thus have no support for this research, financial or otherwise.
