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Nagilo
May 9, 2012, 7:58 AM
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Registered: May 8, 2012
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Hello everybody
Maybe you can support me a bit on my Master's thesis. It's about indoor climbing (gym climbing).
The basic idea is that indoor climbing is an urban trend. Many people have tried it at least once, and many attend a climbing instruction course, but later on they do not continue to climb.
In my Master's Thesis at the WU Executive Academy at the Vienna University for Business and Economics, I hope to identify what different levels of indoor climbers exist and why some of them might stop climbing. The climbing hall City Adventure Center Graz (www.c-a-c.at) is supporting me here in Austria.
So far I got a lot of German speaking responds, but hopefully, you can support me overseas. Just fill in the short questionaire. It will take around 5 minutes to complete the twenty questions.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N2LSRRX
If a question is not of interest for you select "neutral". Otherwise, choose the rating on the scale that fits you best. If you have stopped climbing, please fill in all question as you felt when you were still climbing.
Many thanks in advance.
Matthias Heise
Professional MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation
WU Executive Academy
Vienna University for Business and Economics
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JohnCook
May 9, 2012, 11:40 AM
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The survey needed more thought (Maybe it is just a poor translation from Austrian). Some of the questions could not be answered easily with the options available, and some of them were so badly worded it was a guess at an answer. Very few ways of assessing progress, or asking about problem types and their solutions, or where the best help came from etc etc.
Masters Degrees must be easier to get in Austria than they are in the UK!
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granite_grrl
May 9, 2012, 12:11 PM
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JohnCook wrote: The survey needed more thought (Maybe it is just a poor translation from Austrian). Some of the questions could not be answered easily with the options available, and some of them were so badly worded it was a guess at an answer. Very few ways of assessing progress, or asking about problem types and their solutions, or where the best help came from etc etc. Masters Degrees must be easier to get in Austria than they are in the UK!
I agree, some of the questions (like trying a route for a second time) could not be answered with the options given, some of the statements were simply WTF? (such as climbing fears....what is climbing with 100% power? sounds tiring).
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Nagilo
May 9, 2012, 12:31 PM
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Hello.
Thanks for your feedback. I understand your point. But it's always a question how to balance the data that you want to gather with an empiricial survey with the time needed to fill in the questionaire. People are not really willing to spend 20min on that. Therefore a lot of questions have been skipped and some are rather vague.
The translation was done from a Canadian friend of mine 
Just fill in as much as you understand or as much as you agree. Otherwise just skip the survey. And Master's degree is not much easier her than in U.K. don't worry. The survey is just a small part of the thesis and not the main empirical content.
Thanks
Matthias
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cracklover
May 9, 2012, 3:14 PM
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Nagilo wrote: Hello everybody Maybe you can support me a bit on my Master's thesis. It's about indoor climbing (gym climbing). The basic idea is that indoor climbing is an urban trend. Many people have tried it at least once, and many attend a climbing instruction course, but later on they do not continue to climb. In my Master's Thesis at the WU Executive Academy at the Vienna University for Business and Economics, I hope to identify what different levels of indoor climbers exist and why some of them might stop climbing. The climbing hall City Adventure Center Graz (www.c-a-c.at) is supporting me here in Austria. So far I got a lot of German speaking responds, but hopefully, you can support me overseas. Just fill in the short questionaire. It will take around 5 minutes to complete the twenty questions. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/N2LSRRX If a question is not of interest for you select "neutral". Otherwise, choose the rating on the scale that fits you best. If you have stopped climbing, please fill in all question as you felt when you were still climbing. Many thanks in advance. Matthias Heise Professional MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation WU Executive Academy Vienna University for Business and Economics
I haven't looked at the survey yet, but I hope you realize that you will have a huge bias in your data by soliciting responses here.
For example, let's say 90% of people who climb once never go back again, and you want to survey all people who've climbed. By surveying active climbers, you will be collecting data mostly from that odd 10% who kept at it, and your data will be terribly skewed.
GO
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linejudge
May 9, 2012, 4:01 PM
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I'm in. The survey was good. A couple of odd ball questions, but I got your point.
Good luck and I hope the data helps.
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jt512
May 9, 2012, 4:04 PM
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cracklover wrote: For example, let's say 90% of people who climb once never go back again, and you want to survey all people who've climbed. By surveying active climbers, you will be collecting data mostly from that odd 10% who kept at it, and your data will be terribly skewed. GO
That depends on what he's trying to measure. If he only wants to compare active climbers with quitters, then he only needs a reasonable sample of each group. Even if 90% of ever-climbers have quit, comparisons between quitters and non-quitters could still be valid even if only 10% (say) of his simple were quitters. That might be statistically inefficient, but it's not statistically invalid.
Jay
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Nagilo
May 9, 2012, 7:10 PM
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Hello and good evening from the EU.
Thanks for the lively discussion. I really appreciate the insights that I get.
Everyone of you is right. The resulting data will be skewed because it mostly contains the perception and feelings of active climbers. But inactive climbers are hard to find. That's why we try to do it the opposite way. We took some medium advanced climbers and interviewed them about their feelings and problems. Most of it was the same as you will find in the literature about climbing and training. In the end we came up with more than 70 interesting topics which are too many for a questionaire. By giving out the resulting shorter questionaire to active climbers we hope to identify differences in perception depending on the skill and training level. Finally you can try to use these findings and assume that some of them are valid for inactive climbers.
So far we got about 180 responses within the German speaking area. There is an obvious difference between male and female climbers and there are huge differences between the first two grades/levels and the more advanced ones. The first ones do have mostly technical problems and they are laking frequent training. The medium advanced ones seems to have tons of mental problems and fears. The first drop out of people is located between that shift from technical to mental problems. The second drop out is when it comes from medium advanced to profi sport. They train so often that some people simply can not spend so much time for climbing anymore.
At the moment there are not enough responses from the English version but it seems that the same trends are also valid.
There is a product idea behind the survey. That product focuses on starters and technical and a bit on mental skills. Using the survey we want to see if the market that we assume is really existing and if it might help people. But we are not putting that into idea the survey because knowing the product would skew the data even more.
Thanks again for taking the survey. So far more than 40 people took it. Hope there will be some more 
Cheers
Matthias
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cracklover
May 9, 2012, 7:22 PM
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jt512 wrote: cracklover wrote: For example, let's say 90% of people who climb once never go back again, and you want to survey all people who've climbed. By surveying active climbers, you will be collecting data mostly from that odd 10% who kept at it, and your data will be terribly skewed. GO That depends on what he's trying to measure. If he only wants to compare active climbers with quitters, then he only needs a reasonable sample of each group. Even if 90% of ever-climbers have quit, comparisons between quitters and non-quitters could still be valid even if only 10% (say) of his simple were quitters. That might be statistically inefficient, but it's not statistically invalid. Jay
I can't believe I'm arguing with a statistics guy here - I know, dumb, right? But here goes...
I agree with you, but only if he has a sure-fire way to correlate his respondents between quitters and non-quitters. And if you're only giving the survey to active (mostly mid-to-long-term) climbers - your sample pool for the try-it-once-and-quit is essentially zero. That's the point I was trying to make.
Seems to me it would make more sense to give the survey to people in the climbing gym. At least *some* of them will be in the try-it-once category. Then you just need to find a reliable way to tell which of those will come back, and which won't.
GO
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jt512
May 9, 2012, 7:39 PM
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cracklover wrote: jt512 wrote: cracklover wrote: For example, let's say 90% of people who climb once never go back again, and you want to survey all people who've climbed. By surveying active climbers, you will be collecting data mostly from that odd 10% who kept at it, and your data will be terribly skewed. GO That depends on what he's trying to measure. If he only wants to compare active climbers with quitters, then he only needs a reasonable sample of each group. Even if 90% of ever-climbers have quit, comparisons between quitters and non-quitters could still be valid even if only 10% (say) of his simple were quitters. That might be statistically inefficient, but it's not statistically invalid. Jay I can't believe I'm arguing with a statistics guy here - I know, dumb, right? But here goes... I agree with you, but only if he has a sure-fire way to correlate his respondents between quitters and non-quitters. And if you're only giving the survey to active (mostly mid-to-long-term) climbers - your sample pool for the try-it-once-and-quit is essentially zero. That's the point I was trying to make.
The questionnaire contains a question about whether the respondent is still actively climbing or has quit to so classify climbers. I don't know if he'll get enough quitters by using his sampling plan, though. And if he's really after climbers who literally tried it one time and quit, not only will he not find them on rockclimbing.com, he wouldn't know who they were, anyway, since he hasn't asked it on the questionnaire.
In reply to: Seems to me it would make more sense to give the survey to people in the climbing gym. At least *some* of them will be in the try-it-once category. Then you just need to find a reliable way to tell which of those will come back, and which won't.
I wouldn't ask climbers at the gym, because I doubt you could reliably determine who will and who won't return. What I might do, is get some gyms to cooperate by asking former members whether they would be willing to participate in the survey (OP: that'll be $500—I'll take Euros, if that's all you've got).
Jay
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shockabuku
May 9, 2012, 8:03 PM
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Your survey is clearly biased by your own (or somebody's) pre-conceptions about climbing and training.
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Nagilo
May 9, 2012, 9:46 PM
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;) of course my survey is not completely empirical neutral. There are some assumptions for the product idea and of course, my own perceptions. But it mostly contains data from the interview we conducted. So that the survey is not skewed too much by my own perception.
For the German speaking market we have less than 10% of responds from climbers who quit climbing. But we are trying to get some gyms to send the questionaire to their registered customers. Hopefully there will be a higher number of former customers.
And we also hand out a printed copy in local gyms and talk to people there. Important for us is the way how people on different skill level perceive their problems. And therefore this survey is fairly good enough. But for sure, not goo enough to write a 500 page book containing any new break through idea.
Greeting
Mat
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jt512
May 10, 2012, 3:38 AM
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Nagilo wrote: For the German speaking market we have less than 10% of responds from climbers who quit climbing. But we are trying to get some gyms to send the questionaire to their registered customers.
Is my check "in the mail"?
Jay
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Nagilo
May 10, 2012, 5:08 AM
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Hey Jay.
Luckely gyms here are helpful even without asking a poor student for $500 
Mat
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Nagilo
Jun 2, 2012, 8:40 PM
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Hello
Some weeks ago you participated in a survey about indoor climbing. Finally I prepared a short presentation of the main findings. It is just an easy overview of all points of interest. If you have further questions, feel free to contact me any time. The statistical details and calculations will only be part of my Master's thesis.
http://dl.dropbox.com/...imbing_Survey_EN.pdf
Best regards
Matthias Heise
Professional MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation
WU Excutive Academy
Vienna Unversity of Business and Economics
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