Dressage Survey - please help!

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evolutionequine

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Hello forum members,

Forum admins have given me kind permission to post here.

I am a postgraduate student at Newcastle University (UK) and for my MSc dissertation I am conducting a survey on the assessment of horse and rider in dressage competitions.

I would really appreciate your help with my research, by completing my online Dressage Survey.

You can access the survey by clicking on the link below.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y72MBR5

(If the link doesn't open, please copy and paste it into your browser.)

Thank you very much, I’m very grateful for your help!

Best wishes,

Debbie Busby
 
I think questions 8 and 9 when you ask about if riders feel collective marks are important and to rank which are the most important are a bit daft, obviously they are all equally important?!! Yet you don't give this as an option
 
Hi Galaxy, thanks for your feedback and I appreciate that you think they are equally important. No I didn't give that as an option, the data I want means that I really do want these to be in a ranked order. It will be interesting to see how this works through to the final results. Best wishes, Debbie
 
Done, found it very hard to rank things, and ask me tomorrow, I might answer differently ;) could you post on here when the results are available please, I'd be interested but didn't take a note of your email. Thanks :)
 
Ditto and also the question ranking rhythm, suppleness, collection, straightness etc, they are all important!
galaxy said:
I think questions 8 and 9 when you ask about if riders feel collective marks are important and to rank which are the most important are a bit daft, obviously they are all equally important?!! Yet you don't give this as an option
Click to expand...
 
You could probably do with an open ended box at the end where people could give more info. Also, I do one dressage test a year, but because of that I didn't answer the 'why don't you compete?' questions, but maybe I should have as I am clearly not as devoted to dressage as many will be. Or alternatively you should have asked the mirror question of 'why do you compete?'.
 
Sorry but as a dressage trainer I do not feel the questions asked and options given are leading towards anything. Before I try again can you explain what it is you are trying to achieve?

Simon
 
I'm only at a novice level but I also struggle to 'rank' some of the elements. E.g. the scales of training (rhythm, suppleness.....) are all inter-related and equally important. They show a progression towards more advanced work and one element may be more important for a specific horse one week, then a different element may be more important a week later! Similar for the collectives.
 
I find it rather worrying that a survey that is part of a master's dissertation is so flawed. I don't wish to be unkind but I think the OP needs to go back and start again with a lot more academic rigour.
 
evolutionequine said:
Hi Galaxy, thanks for your feedback and I appreciate that you think they are equally important. No I didn't give that as an option, the data I want means that I really do want these to be in a ranked order. It will be interesting to see how this works through to the final results. Best wishes, Debbie
Click to expand...

I'm afraid a lot of your replies as you can see in this thread will be meaningless as people will be answering for the sake of giving you an answer. You cannot rank these things.
 
Thanks for your feedback everybody. I have already received hundreds of completed responses but I'm sorry that some of you have posted that you gave up! Thanks for sticking with it, those who made it to the end. email is d.k.busby@ncl.ac. uk if you would like to receive information about the results.
 
I also gave up at the question re importance of the scales of training.....they cannot possibly be given a ranking in order of importance.....its missing the whole point of them!! You can't carry on without answering that question and as a pro Trainer/Rider/Judge I can't rank them 1-6 as asked by the survey!!
 
Sorry to be blunt but I simply do not see the point of that survey and where it was leading.

For example:
Question 4 – both sets of marks are equally important as a rider will aim to score the best for their test which means both of these sets of marks count!!

Question 5 – All of the collectives are important as they cover all aspects of training. To rank them in order of importance is pointless.

Question 6 – How important is the test judged accurately? Sorry, is this a trick question. Of course it should be!!!

Question 12 – Ranking the scales of training, linking this to technology or not, is simply a waste of time as they are all important and all interlinked. To rank them in order would be giving totally the wrong idea.

The simple fact that you have had hundreds of responses means nothing. Just because you have answers to question do not make the questions valid!!!
Sorry, not good.
Simon
 
I've also given up because the questioning is poor.

Be aware that people might be ranking things very erratically. For example, I currently care most about submission in the collectives because that's where we're weakest, but it doesn't mean it's most important. Others may not be so self aware so the answers would actually hint at common holes in modern training, not the importance of elements.

I'm pretty fed up of people doing poor surveys and refusing to change them - why don't we ever get people asking if they could test a survey first?!
 
Good point, Theocat. I did a survey for my master's, (not horse related) & the 'pilot' stage is a very important one. I'm revisiting a lot of stuff now as I'm doing a research proposal for a professional doctorate, so it's very fresh in my mind that there MUST be a pilot and there MUST be time built into the whole project to analyse the pilot results & give the survey a good sort-out if necessary - then re-pilot if the first one was a mile off.

And before the pilot, there is an even more important stage where you have a good think about what data you want, what you want to do with it & how best to ask for it in order to get something meaningful... There is no point having 'hundreds' of responses if they're not telling you anything useful. E.g. if you force people to put numbers on things when they don't want to, you will undeniably have lots of stats to play with, but they won't *mean* anything, which kind of makes the whole thing null & void...

T x
 
We're used to getting requests to complete some rather unpolished student surveys here on HHO. Mostly, I do them. However, it is rather depressing that someone who is undertaking a Master's degree at a reputable red brick university has so little insight as to what constitutes a valid and worthwhile survey. You would have thought that it should have been well covered at first degree level.
 
When I was an undergraduate psychology major, we had to constuct a pilot survey for the research project we were doing and we had long conversations with our professor about how to write questions that got useful data. It was in the days before everyone used internet forums, and we had to hang out in the student union and try to recruit participants. But still...

Do people not do this anymore?

I finished the survey, but admittedly, my rankings were utterly random. It's more of an experiment in psychology, rather than dressage: if you give people a list of things that are all equally important for their sport and then ask them to rank them, how likely are they to cobble the things into some kind of order, just for the sake of answering the question.
 
I also gave up at the point when it asked respondents to rank things, for the same reasons as mentioned by others. Perhaps the OP is trying to find out something about the psychology of filling out frustrating surveys, as Caol Ila suggests? ;) What degree is this for? Something in the social sciences?
 
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