Sneeze Survey

[bubli]

A while back I decided to make a survey about how often people in the community sneeze and share the (anonymised) data publically. But I forgot to share the survey here. The survey is at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScT5CJ91tFLacYivfUJjVZKvxLXFo0932MSvLSC8UQOdoS_sw/viewform and the data is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vqaW-3cmIvlqdLwnV4CPYVRlxZDtNQaIZ2MixF5TOl4/edit?usp=sharing. I'd really appreciate it if people filled it out because the more people do, the more robust any conclusion we can draw from it are.

So far, we can conclude that people sneeze significantly more with colds than during allergy season and both allergies and colds make people more likely to sneeze in multiples. Although there still isn't any evidence of a relationship between how often people sneeze with seasonal allergies and the number of sneezes per set, there is evidence of a relationship for colds and in the absence of either. Although a linear regression doesn't fit, using some statistical techniques (kendall's and spearman's tests) I semi-understand, I'm able to say that if someone sneezes more frequently, they are also more likely to sneeze in multiples ( p<0.06 for regular and p<0.02 for colds), so co-incidence is unlikely (obviously these two statistics aren't independent though, so I can't claim anywhere near a 0.0012 significance level.) These tests work by comparing ranks, (as in is the 5th most frequent sneezer also likely to sneeze the 5th most per set) and found a significant (if somewhat week) relationship. As far as I know this is currently unstudied so it would be really great if more people could fill out the survey to make this conclusion more robust. (and if someone who actually knows some stats could check that I've not made a stupid mistake)

[Rainberry]

Awesome. I will fill in the survey!

[Anyponedrawn]

Thank you. I will give it a look! I do like the findings and I am always interested in that.

[bubli]

Thank you both! Always makes me happy to get more answers

[Sniffles]

I will take it after work! Welcome newcomer.

[Soda]

I will take this survey!

[bubli]

Thank you both! And if anyone has any theories that they want me to check out, please tell me!

[Kiwi]

Fantastic. Nice to see a survey. Wish you had much more results to draw from. I will fill this out this weekend.

[FoxTail]

I will take it too! Thanks and interesting findings so far.

Is there any info you consider surprising or not what you expected?

I think it's unfortunate we can't parse the info between male and females as well.

[Bumble]

A lot of the terminology was odd and because of this many of the questions asked were pretty weird. I would add definitions and make word many of the questions better. It was very strange at times. I took the survey.

I have to also agree that the lack of gender defining info is a missed opportunity. It would be neat to see trends dependent on males vs females, etc. It's especially odd since you do break down animal allergies later in the survey.

Not having "dust" or "dander" as an allergy option is quite frankly insane given that this is supposed to be taken seriously as a survey. Definitely need to fix that.

Also the question asking "if you are a photic sneezer, how often do you..." Well, if we are NOT a photic sneezer, we don't have an option to say we are not! We are forced to put the answer "1" regardless. This will give false results.

Unfortunately, the survey is very amateurish at times and seems to really miss the ball. It needs a huge overall and I would be happy to help if you need it.

[Bumble]

[Removed]

[Kiwi]

A lot of the terminology was odd and because of this many of the questions asked were pretty weird. I would add definitions and make word many of the questions better. It was very strange at times. I took the survey.

I have to also agree that the lack of gender defining info is a missed opportunity. It would be neat to see trends dependent on males vs females, etc. It's especially odd since you do break down animal allergies later in the survey.

Not having "dust" or "dander" as an allergy option is quite frankly insane given that this is supposed to be taken seriously as a survey. Definitely need to fix that.

Also the question asking "if you are a photic sneezer, how often do you..." Well, if we are NOT a photic sneezer, we don't have an option to say we are not! We are forced to put the answer "1" regardless. This will give false results.

Unfortunately, the survey is very amateurish at times and seems to really miss the ball. It needs a huge overall and I would be happy to help if you need it.

You are not wrong. I was running into issues while taking the survey because I didn't know what their terminology was. It also lacks a lot of depth where you think it should be.

[bubli]

A lot of the terminology was odd and because of this many of the questions asked were pretty weird. I would add definitions and make word many of the questions better. It was very strange at times. I took the survey.

I have to also agree that the lack of gender defining info is a missed opportunity. It would be neat to see trends dependent on males vs females, etc. It's especially odd since you do break down animal allergies later in the survey.

Not having "dust" or "dander" as an allergy option is quite frankly insane given that this is supposed to be taken seriously as a survey. Definitely need to fix that.

Also the question asking "if you are a photic sneezer, how often do you..." Well, if we are NOT a photic sneezer, we don't have an option to say we are not! We are forced to put the answer "1" regardless. This will give false results.

Unfortunately, the survey is very amateurish at times and seems to really miss the ball. It needs a huge overall and I would be happy to help if you need it.

Thanks for your advice. The questions are worded slightly strangely in an attempt to be as unambiguous as possible, but if you think there are things which need clarification, please do elaborate and I can change that. I also agree that not having dust as an allergen option was silly, it was entirely accidental and I didn't pick up on it because people were writing it in, so that is now fixed. If a question is not relevant to you, there is no need to answer it (the form is set up so the only mandatory question is the first one). Whilst I agree that gender info could be interesting, it wasn't in scope for this survey so I don't intend to add it. In general, adding more questions is difficult when the survey is already created, but if I do a new one in the future I'll consider that. Again, thanks for your offer of help and for filling it out, if there are any specific things you feel should be clarified, please do let me know here or at the email linked to the survey.

[bubli]

I will take it too! Thanks and interesting findings so far.

Is there any info you consider surprising or not what you expected?

I think it's unfortunate we can't parse the info between male and females as well.

Thanks for taking it. Nothing I've found so far is especially surprising (although I'm sure there are questions you could ask that I haven't thought to which might yield more surprising results) but as of the most recent data I can say that although most people are sneezier with colds than allergies, there are more people who get extremely sneezy from allergies than from colds (or possibly the lower number of data points makes it more sensitive to outliers) so the mean is pulled higher for allergies despite the median being lower. To be honest, differentiating by gender wasn't even something I considered, there doesn't seem to be any reason to expect it to have an effect, and roughly halfling the data pool would probably make any results less reliable, but if I do this again I will definitely think about doing that.

[bubli]

You are not wrong. I was running into issues while taking the survey because I didn't know what their terminology was. It also lacks a lot of depth where you think it should be.

If you let me know exactly what was confusing, I may be able to clarify. What depth did you feel was missing?