WTH? first non-profit puritan extremist, now this?

It could be part of an information design project, I suppose.

Do you really think anyone on Typophile is qualified to opine about anything involving teenage sex?

What do you mean, "now this?" It exists out there already its not like the survey is changing or creating their existence in the world.
Yes this part of an information design project.
Everyone is qualified to answer.Youre telling me people on Typophile cant think or have an opinion?

skald89, I started taking your survey, but stopped because question #2 (main reason for teen pregnancy) left out a number of reasons cited by some experts; #4 also leaves out some commonly-cited reasons; and most of your questions don't have a "don't know" option

I don't want a "I dont know" on purpose because I want people to choose what they THINK is the right answer. #2 and #4 the answers that SOME experts say, what are the choices?

Why pick on teens?
Teen pregnancy is perfectly natural, and healthier than later.
More problematic:
How about a survey on 40+ pregnancy?
In vitro?
Senior hysterectomies?
That's my opinion on your survey.
Nothing like framing an issue by aggregating answers to leading questions, from people with a subjective opinion on something they haven't studied and know very little about.
No I'm not naive: I haven't looked at the survey, but I suspect it is really about teenagers having sex out of wedlock and abortion.

Yeah, that's the basic idea of the survey. I'm suppose to pick something I feel is important as my project and this I feel is more important the 40+ pregnancy.

Then why not call it what it is, a teen abortion survey?

The only mention about abortion in the survey is one question's answer. No, that would not be a good title for the survey.

OK, sorry, but now I had a look at the survey, and as suspected the general presumption is that there is something wrong with teenage pregnancy. Don't you think that's rather prejudiced against young couples under 20 who start a family? it's tough enough for them anyway, without this stigma. "Teen Pregnancy" is a loaded concept, encompassing as it does 13-yr olds.

Teenage pregnancy is a worthwhile social goal, rather than the present trend in society, which is towards more Middle-age Pregnancy. A woman is most fertile at 18, and pregnancy complications increase significantly after age 35.

Of course, the way things are at the moment, there are all kinds of impediments to early pregnancy, most notably the impact it has on a woman's career.

Why not call the survey "High School Pregnancy"?

.. And the underlying reason to bring this survey under the attention of Typophile was:

(a) Typophile's demographics show a large part of font designers is teen, pregnant, or both

(b) Surveymonkey uses a very interesting font on its web site

(c) You are of Eastern European origin and trying to lure as much clicks possible to the website which is hiding under the well-known brand name "surveyмопкеу"

-- oh what the hell, let's add this one just for the heck of it.

(d) I Honestly Don't Have A Clue and Don't Really Care As Well.

Please pick one.

B is the best answer.

The real answer, need people to fill it out and its design related.

I like that Mødre I Bønn frank posted.

My Herb Lubalin homage.

Hey skald89. I think you should be smart about the wonderful advantage typophile gives to young designers, which is design critique. I'd suggest you stop asking us about teenage pregnancy, get on with your survey on FB or other social forums if you may. Then work on your infographic and post it here and request the people for opinions on what they know best. Type and design.

While an interesting and important subject, teenage pregnancy is not a subject which is related to type or type design or type criticism, or anything in fact to do with type. So I'm not sure why it is here. I could post a lot of subjects here which have nothing to do with the forum and so could everyone else.

Your survey is full of suggestive questions, limited answer-sets, and radical ideology.

I am sure that you will gain no insight what so ever. Even if you do not aim on that, and just want to use it for ideology purposes, the questionary is so obviously flawed, that it will only backfire.

I don't think, I really could make you understand, but... forget for a moment everything what you thought to be true. Look at some facts.

This is a world map for teenage pregnancy. It clearly shows the US has a significant higher percentage than other developed countries.

What could the reason for that be?
Teenage pregnancy is a problem of information and education that sex is ok, if one has respect for oneself and for the other. Teenagers are way more capable of making responsible decisions, than one might think. This kind of eduction would not be primarily focused on STDs and abstinence, just to scare teens off, like it happens in places in the US.

The norms of a society majorly influence teenage pregnancy.

Compare the high values of teen pregnancy with high age of consent by law in the US and in northern and western European countries. There is a negative correlation. Why? because law is just the normative formulation of the moral values of a society. Compare as well for example with this map about atheists.

Another part of the story is of course economically as well. To highlight this one could take a look at this map of global inequality of wealth per country. low value is a more equal society.

flooce: Compare the high values of teen pregnancy with high age of consent by law in the US and in northern and western European countries. There is a negative correlation. Why? because law is just the normative formulation of the moral values of a society.

The law is a formulation of one set of moral values within a society. The sexualisation of children in advertising and pornographication of sexuality in popular culture demonstrates the active moral values of North American society at large, and has a much more direct impact on the attitude and behaviour of teenagers than either laws or sex education programmes. In most other parts of the world, traditional cultural moral values tend to be less eroded by free market capitalism than they are in North America -- although constantly under assault --, and sexualised advertising, music and film is not considered acceptable. The perverse approach to sex education in the USA is a desperate counter-guard fight against the prevailing social mores, ironically enacted by the same politicians who committed the country to the neo-con radical free market agenda that always and everywhere erodes the traditional values they try to prop up by legislative means.

(Not typography, but concerning infographics:)

This is a world map for teenage pregnancy. It clearly shows the US has a significant higher percentage than other developed countries.

No it doesn't, because it's a map for live births.
Perhaps the US would be closer to other developed countries if abortions were easier to get there.

Also, the map doesn't show the average age of (mothers who give) live births.
I wonder how different that would be.

See what I don't understand is if this is for school, why not advertise this survey to people in school? If you do it here, majority of the members on this website are well beyond their teen years.

Logically it seems more reasonable to do this at school where there are plenty of teens, and even some that have probably dealt with teenage pregnancy.

Better yet, Facebook it up! Then your close friends can do it! Haza!

Nick:
Perhaps the US would be closer to other developed countries if abortions were easier to get there.

According to WHO data, there are 21 abortions per 1000 women per year in the USA and 12 in Western Europe. I don't remember which year. Washington Post reports the rate as 19

That does not really answer the full complexity of your question, though.

Isnt this the "General Discussions Anything goes." section?
This isn't completely unrelated to design.

Survey has been updated
updated survey

This has nothing to do with type, but since it's come up: the prospects for children born to unwed young women who never marry the father are disastrous as far as the percentages who end up in poverty, in jail, on welfare, with low academic achievement, with mental health problems, and so on.

Physically, it is true that young women have a health advantage in bearing children. But the social costs in urban societies around the world are extremely high, for the mother and even more for the child.

These grave personal and social problems are not puritanism, but reality.

Bill, note that Nick was talking about teenage pregnancy and motherhood, not necessarily unmarried pregnancy and motherhood.

Physically, it is true that young women have a health advantage in bearing children. But the social costs in urban societies around the world are extremely high, for the mother and even more for the child.

Which strongly suggests that there is something seriously wrong with those societies.

John, in our society, teen marriage is extremely rare, so that unmarried teen pregnancy is the rule. I agree with you that this is a huge problem, but the solution is alas not easy. Statistically, the chances of a marriage lasting increase up to age 26 for the age of marriage. The prospects are poor for teen marriages, which isn't to say they shouldn't happen.

> the prospects for children born to unwed young
> women who never marry the father are disastrous
> as far as the percentages who end up in poverty,
> in jail, on welfare...

Yes, unfortunately the statistics show that's very true. The children often grow up in poverty (or at least in financial difficulty), if the mother works outside the home they are often raised largely by a grandmother or other relative, and they often grow up with no father figure. I personally know several families in this situation.

Your 4th question is just plain weird since it omits all of the rather obvious main reasons why teens have sex such as biological drives and hormones.

André

“(a) Typophile's demographics show a large part of font designers is teen, pregnant, or both.”

Source?

@skald89: I do not understand your purpose. Are you looking for data? Advice on your experimental design, a better font to use… As it stands I'm not quite sure I see Typophile as the best place to be polling for information on teen pregnancy, regardless what your demographic data tells you. I suggest you revesit your population selection methodology. If you are doing this at a university you should have access to a subject pool. I have a chapter in an intro psych text that deals with questionnaire design. I’ll see if I can dig it up tomorrow.

Christopher, it was a list for skald89 to choose from. I'm as puzzled as you are by his insistance it's relevant to typography.

skald89: Isnt this the "General Discussions Anything goes." section?

Yeah, well, there is a practical limit though. Perhaps the phrase could be changed to "Anything on type goes".

skald89: This isn't completely unrelated to design.

That'd only be true if you were discussing the design.

Theunis de Jong
http://typophile.com/node/79829
http://typophile.com/node/81708
http://typophile.com/node/81687
http://typophile.com/node/81709
http://typophile.com/node/123
http://typophile.com/node/41104

I don't understand how typophile is a bad place to get responses? It isn't my main source and the members do have brains and can take a survey. It is design related, it isn't a design that I'm asking for criticism on. Its part of the process of creating the design just like finding the right type face is part of the process. If it was a regular survey completely unrelated to design I would not have posted it here, it really does not belong on typophile.

I think what the general concensus regarding this topic is that it is just a weird survey to be posting on a forum dedicated to people who are addicted/passionate about typography. If this was Nexopia or a Cosmopolitan, there might be some merit to this survey, but such isn't the case.

I understand that the survey is a little odd. Its the project I am working on and its a design project which led me to see if typophile has a section I could post it in.

“…and its a design project…”

I still think I am missing something. How exactly is this project related to design?

Perhaps we are using the same word to mean two different things?

Experimental design
Graphic design

For what school and course is this project?

Someone else has asked the same question. It is an information design project. Now let me ask people a question. For the most part people who have posted a response in this read has spent a minute typing and coming up with something to say to me for making this post. Wouldn't have been simpler to either mod alert the post or spend the minute helping me and taking the survey? (not trying to be a jerk, simply asking a question)

Gathering information is not 'information design'.

Once you get your information, THEN come back and we can help you present it in a visual manner.

Until then, maybe don't annoy the natives. It'll make it easier for you to get real design advice when you need it.

Wouldn't [it] have been simpler to...spend the minute helping me and taking the survey?

Well, my rationale for not taking the survey wasn't because it is off topic (though it is), but rather because the survey itself is rather poorly designed. Your questions involve tacit presuppositions which force the taker to choose between a variety of incorrect and potentially misleading answers.

André

skald89, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I did start taking your survey, but stopped because the survey was not constructed well. You didn't clearly differentiate between married and unmarried teens, you left out some common answers that many folks would have chosen if available, etc. I felt that if I finished your survey the results would be misleading.

Im limited to how specific I can be in my questions because I am unpaid member. I have updated it to reflect my data and a lot of the information that I have found does not differentiate between married and unmarried teens. I have also added a text box if people want to add comments to their answers.

New survey I said I have posted
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/B3TS9H6

For a couple of the questions I did not do the full research:
"5. The 2 top prevention methods are?"
"7. Teen Pregnancy is most common in the US with"

@aluminum
"Gathering information is not 'information design'.
Once you get your information, THEN come back and we can help you present it in a visual manner.
Until then, maybe don't annoy the natives. It'll make it easier for you to get real design advice when you need it."
I was not saying it 'information design,' I was answering someone as how it is design related. In an information design project I don't see how the research part is really different than picking a font. They both are a form of research for the design at hand. Yes, maybe if I put this in the critic forum or type id I would understand the whole this is not in the right place, but it clearly states "General Discussions Anything goes" which is why I felt I can post this with out breaking any rules.

I'm sorry for creating my post.

[deleted; I figured out the answer to the question I asked]

Your findings will be flawed by design, you will only get the answers you want to hear, which will echo your ideology. You don't know anything about social research.

Go to the library, read a book on quantitative interviews. Start over.

The way it is now many will not answer the questionnaire.

I didn't choose the answers my self though. All my answers are from sources I have found.

Just pick one of them. Any, really

http://

Flooce:
I will be honest, thanks for trying to help me. Its finals weeks for me and I also have a list of books I need to read, so I wont be able to read any of those books by the time I hand in this project. Would you be able to pick one of my questions and tell me why its wrong and why you're recommending these books?

Im limited to how specific I can be in my questions because I am unpaid member.

Your initial post suggested this was for a school project, but now it sounds like you're doing this for an organization of some sort. Which organization would that be?

André

I assume your attempt is sincere and I actually don't mind a completely different opinion, as long as the research that forms that opinion follows some rules of deduction. My problem is, that your attempt to research fails any criteria that would be somehow scientific.

I send you some articles of scientific journals on the topic, you can do your own research if you want to. If previous research would answer the current research question, then the current research question would not be necessary. Previews findings are important to understand a topic and to know which questions one need to ask in the first place to get new information.

These four papers are highly relevant, as they will show important factors of teenage pregnancy in western industrialized societies. They help you to establish which factors that can influence an outcome are constant throughout the research and which do variable. With this information you can ask yourself why is your case different? What is the same and what is different in your case, than in other cases? There lies the key to the question about what ever you want to find out. As you can not experiment with society at large, you can only compare and try eliminate factors that do not have an influence.

These papers as I said will help you to design the questionnaire in a better way.

To your questionnaire, if you want to discuss it here, we can, but the content should rather be discussed in a social science related environment, rather than a graphic design.

if you want me to really help me, then you can write what you actually want to find out with each question, which information do you want to get from your sample of interviewees?

agisaak :
Unpaid member on surveymonkey.com where I made the survey.

10 questions are certainly a limitation, however one can work around that with a good questionnaire. If it becomes too long, it will be much harder to compute the results.

The main things I want to know are what people know/think are the right answers to:
1 - estimated teen pregnancies from 05-09 in the US
2 - estimated teen abortions from 05-09 in the US
3 - why teens have sex and become pregnant in the US
4 - Which 3 states have the most teen pregnancies
5 - How teen pregnancy can be prevented
6 - If teen pregnancy is a burden on the US economy
7 - The age and gender of the people answering

I know the facts from my research. I am not using the survey to find out how many teen pregnancies and abortions exist, it is to find out the world's knowledge to show if they do or don't know the facts.

90% of the people on this forum are guys, your stats are going to be horribly inaccurate.

You mix up a lot in your questionnaire, if you just want to test knowledge. I would as well check the source of your facts, if this is based on solid science.

Example: The Q2 and many of its answers confuse pregnancy with sex. This is ideologically laden.

You say you test knowledge, when you actually don't, you test opinions as well in Q3, Q4, Q7 (subjective, socially determined). Not only do you test opinions, when you think you test knowledge, but you have a very limited answer-set, which does in the understanding of some do not reflect the real causes or do not describe the issue correctly.

That is why I send you some papers, so you can think again if your “facts” actually mean anything.

It'll be completely pointless for me to take this survey. US pregnancy stats are so far away from any of my interests that they don't even register on long-range scanners.

BrettR:
How can my stats be wrong because its all guys on here? The stats are suppose to show what people think/know are you implying guys are not people?

Té Rowan:
Yes, it may be completely pointless for you to take it because you gain nothing from it. Whether a person thinks about it or cares at all about the topic their answers will still be valid for my goal.

flooce:
You can say my answers are very limited but that is the facts I found. I am not asking anyone to go and study up to find the answers. Its merely a test to see what the general public's knowledge is on the topic. If someone came around asking "How many people do you think live in the US today? A B C D E F" You only have 6 answers which you can argue is limited. The correct answer is amongst the six and you arent only given 2 choices which would make the results useless because its a 50/50 chance of getting the right answer.
I had questions I am answering in my project and asked the same questions in my survey. In the survey I listed the answers I found in my research. I test opinions or knowledge whats the difference, when saying people think or say this when asked question A? The way people answer is based on their opinion which comes from their knowledge. None of my questions are "whats your favorite ice cream flavor?" Yes that is opinion and not fact. My questions are facts, you can have an opinion or think you know something but its not an opinion based question.

skald89, since you disagree with many of the comments we've made about your survey, why don't you show the survey to your teacher and get their opinion on how it's written?

JamesM:
My teacher knows I made the survey and I have posted it to our class blog like she told me to do.
I hear people's comments and agree that my original survey is severely flawed. I just don't understand how the new one is or how asking my professor's opinion will make a difference on people's opinion on here. I asked the questions and supplied all the answers I found on reliable sources. What else is there to do? I didn't make up answers so I won't be getting answers I want to hear its facts and social misconceptions. I have 18 responses for my new survey and 72 for my original. If I don't get at least 50 responses to the new one I am going to leave the part of "public's knowledge" out of my design.

> My teacher knows I made the survey

Okay but I was suggesting that you ask your teacher's opinion about the way the survey is written.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time about this. Writing a proper survey is hard, especially when dealing with a controversial subject. I agree that you've made some improvements to it.

JamesM:
Sorry, I should have been clearer in responding. She told me to put it up on the blog because its the way we communicate and she also said that the class and her should take the survey.

I appreciate people trying to help me with the quality of the survey. I'm wondering do people know the actual answers or what the sources say, that everyone is saying my answers are limited?
Questions 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 how are they bad survey questions?

I don't know anymore, to be honest I thought the survey was decent. I asked questions and gave the answers reliable sources(no articles and newspapers) supplied.

Thanks everyone for your inputs.

@skald89 - If I understood you correctly, your survey is testing people's knowledge of pre-existing statistics. Well, I know sod all on this subject. Hence, you would gain nothing from my participation.

Te Rowan:
Yes, your pre-existing knowledge.
Whether you do or don't know a thing about the subject you fall under the category of the general public. What I am trying to achieve is finding out what the world thinks/knows. Thinking can be wrong and based on inaccurate information.
This is the basic idea of what I am trying to achieve. The design is just to portray my goal.

I don't know what the actual hypothesis you are trying to investigate is, so some of my comments might be off base, but here are a few things for you to consider.

With respect to questions 2 and 3, I don't really see how people's responses here could possibly be interesting or informative. I can't figure out what type of investigation would actually care whether people know or don't know the specific numeric values which you give; I can see one trying to establish whether people's assessment of the prevalence of teen pregnancy is accurate, and whether their views on this matter correlate with attitudes towards teen pregnancy, but asking a question about raw numbers won't achieve this. Unless you have some way of establishing whether your respondents have a reasonably accurate view of the *size* of the relevant demographic, I don't see how you could possibly interpret their responses. Also, it's somewhat odd that in Q3 the entire range of 100 000–200 000 is omitted from your set of answers.

Also, bear in mind that when you start posting your survey on forums such as this one, you are appealing to an international audience. Most non-Americans have no real reason to know stats on teen pregnancy in the USA (you might perhaps want to reconsider some of Té Rowan's comments in this light -- he's posting from Iceland).

Question 4 and 5, though, are where the real problems lie. In question (4) you ask for reasons why teens have sex, but some of your answers seem to be more appropriate for a question regarding why teens get pregnant. 'Rape' and 'Taught abstinence Only' do not make sense to me as reasons why people have sex, though they might be reasons why they get pregnant. 'Lack of Education' only makes sense as an answer to this question if you are making the implicit assumption that teen sex is somehow bad and that only those who don't know better would do it. I can't help wondering whether you haven't inadvertently conflated two different questions here.

Putting that aside and assuming you really are asking about sex rather than pregnancy, your answer set is simply strange in terms of what it omits. Adults have sex for a wide variety of reasons including, among others, the fact that it is enjoyable, the fact that it can strengthen social bonds, and the simple fact that human beings have biological urges. Yet you omit all of these as possible answers suggesting that teens have sex for entirely different reasons than adults.

Now it's possible that this is the case, and perhaps you do believe this, but if you want to make some claim regarding why teens have sex, you cannot build this assumption into your answer set. The majority of your answers seem to presuppose that teens don't have an inherent desire for sex, but rather have this imposed on them by outside factors. Once again, it is possible that this is the case (or is the case in some instances), but if you limit your answer set to possibilities which make this assumption you are not going to get meaningful results (and of course, even if you did include a wider range of possibilities, establishing why people *think* teens have sex cannot be used to argue for why teens *actually* have sex which is, most likely, fairly heterogeneous anyways).

Question 5 is poorly constructed since it isn't clear whether you are talking about preventing teen pregnancy or preventing *unwanted* teen pregnance -- two entirely different issues. Also, given the weird blend of responses in question 4 which appear to conflate sex and pregnancy, I also find myself with a lingering worry that you are doing the same thing here and contemplating ways of preventing *sex* rather than pregnancy (at least for the answers 2, 3 and 5).

Also, use of contraceptives and abstinence fall into an entirely different category than education through parents, schools, or after-school programs. It's not clear that they really belong in the same answer set.

Moreover, your educational options are overly vague. You give, for example, the possible answer 'parents talking to their kids'. Talking about what? Contraception? Eternal Damnation? These answers really should be made more precise or you will not have any way of determining exactly how your respondents were interpreting these.

Finally, I think you'd get considerably better data if you asked about a more narrowly defined demographic than 'teen' -- after all, this would include middle schoolers, high schoolers, as well as many college freshmen and sophomores. I think you'll find that people's attitudes towards sex are *very* different for these three demographics.

André

To delete a thread contact Tiffany Wardle aka Miss Tiffany and ask her to do it.

http://typophile.com/user/108

Skald89 is this part of an information design project—as John suggested—or design and typography in anyway?

It was going to be added to an info graphic pamphlet. Can it be deleted please?