kristin:That's why I'm not taking any real specific info - no full birth dates or addresses and why I'm not asking people to post it online. Just enough info to show that it's real people. The age and location is for demographical statistics.
I'll tell you what - I'll leave the poll on ECF as it is and only use the verified results in my survey paper. However, just to be cler, the ECF poll will hold no weight with the "powers that be" and can't be used as true, statistical data.
This isn't just for the government/FDA - it's for people to take into city council meetings when antis want to ban indoor vaping or try to ban sales, to link to when posting comments regarding negative, uninformed articles, to show employers, to show the "save the children" groups and to show people considering vaping. It should have a huge range of applications - but only if it's more than just a forum poll.
I understand and you should definitely continue along your way with it. Just suggesting that as an aside you could also link to the full poll - my guess is that the ratios will be the same anyway, it would just be a larger sampling.
And if the government wants the information - wouldn't you want them to have it??
No.
Most of us are already signing petitions and contacting our government officials in an attempt to get through to them.
I'd say 'a lot of you' are, probably not 'most of us'. And I can understand why you might think why that might be helpful.
If we hide behind forum usernames, they will never take us seriously. I would only give up the names if ordered legally to do so - and I can't really see why that would happen. None of the questions have any legal ramifications that I can see - one of the reasons "Use blackmarket ecigs" wasn't a choice on the survey for question #7.
Just to give you one example that actually happened recently and was supposedly "corrected" - is that the current administration put out to support groups to turn in the names and emails of people on forums that were against their current health care plan. The idea - as it was intended was to contact those people and get them to inform them and change their minds and in fact, some people were contacted with that intent. These were people that happened to go on a forum and were in no way connected to the policies nor had ever contributed to the President's campaign and yet through this manner, were contacted by the staff.
And it had nothing to do with doing anything illegal, only that they disagreed with the President's policies.
I won't even get into what has happened in history as to people gathering names of people that disagreed with the then leaders of certain countries.
My only point here was that I didn't think it would be a problem to include the whole poll for those that may understand why people either didn't want to include any personal information or couldn't be contacted. And to remind people that no matter what a person (not just you) would say they wouldn't divulge information when the gov't wants it they will get it. They could also likely get that info if they traced down each user ID but it would be a lot easier getting it from a central source.