| From the book: Stress and the Care of the Self Mandala Key Exercise The Roots of the Tree (finding your purpose and passion) The Fruit of the Tree (Changing your life) The Layers of Marriage The Marriage Survey Newsletters |
 How to Live Without Losing Your Life |
Other Writings The Balance between Love and Money Understanding the Universal Unconscious The Crisis of Privacy Faith and Voting Is Death a Choice or Fate? Happy People Raising the Minimum Wage |
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The Layers of Marriage The Layers of Marriage Survey was available online for three weeks in December of 2008. It was designed to gather a general picture of people's understanding and views of marriage. The data gathered is being used to help me write three projects about relationships, marriage and commitment. In designing the survey, there were several deliberate choices made in forming and presenting the questions. I owe a great deal of thanks to Dr. Theresa Garcia for helping me assemble the survey so quickly and for use of her statistical analysis software. The questionnaire was broken into three parts: establishing questions, perception questions and experience. The establishing questions involved such things as a person's age, marital status, income, education, and geographical location. The perception questions related a series of statements about marriage and the perception of married people and then asked the person responding to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how true they felt the statement was. The experience questions allowed people to write their own answers in response to the questions. Two decisions were made as the survey was being organized. The first, given the controversial and political debate surrounding marriage in the USA, in particular as in regards to legalizing gay marriage, that the question allowing the responder to identify their sexual preference was placed near the end of the survey to avoid triggering an immediate political and/or defensive reaction. The second, which surprisingly not one person who responded questioned, was the fact that at no point during the survey was the responder allowed to identify their gender. Even when asked their sexual identity the terms provided were unisexual, clinical terms. This decision was made based in the belief that a common block to the discussion about relationships and marriage in society is the emphasis and rationalization of beliefs based upon a person's gender, which in the majority of mental health circles is recognized to be a product of cultural expectations rather than a hardwired, gender specific inclination. Rather than have a responder begin by identifying themselves by gender and sexuality (with all its automatic social expectations of response), they were asked to begin from the point of age and experience. Over 9,232 people took the survey within the three weeks it was available. 9,131 responses are included in this summation. The responses that were excluded were flagged by the system for being potentially invalid responses or duplicate responses. Ages were grouped in sets of five years except for the age range of 55-65. This was done according to the perceived level impact of the Internet on people's lives. This is only a brief summary and does not attempt to analyze the total data gathered nor is it a complete presentation of all the potential grouping of the data. Results: of the 9,131 responses 98% of the total respondents were from the continental USA and almost evenly split between states. |
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