As a low carber and researcher I need your help!
 

Hello everyone

I am a student at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK in my final year studying BSc Nutrition. I have been researching low carbohydrate living for the past year and as well as deciding to live the low carb lifestyle I also wanted to do my final year research dissertation on the topic. I would like to gather information about the opinions and experiences of people who have been on or currently on low carbohydrate diets.

I would hugely appreciate it if any of you could take 5-10 minutes of your time to complete a survey I have produced as the basis of my research project. It is 100% anonymous and will go towards the ever new research of low carb diets. Thank you so much for reading this and completing my survey if you choose to do so!

https://demo-account.onlinesurveys....-feelings-surro

updated Jan.16, 2017 ..

Excellent Question. I would like to see how the answer to this one correlates to other answers. good luck in your research.

Glad to help!

Done. Long-term (15+ years) LC participants :wave: might not remember exactly what those first days were like.

Good luck with your study. The more evidence the better!

nutribelle - Completed my survey this afternoon. Happy to help you with any information needs.

By the way, welcome to the forum! Please don't be a stranger here, as there is a lot of information for someone like you doing research in this area. Lot's of knowledgeable posters here.

Also, since we have a thirst for nutritional knowledge, please share your findings with us. We would really appreciate a summary of your dissertation when you're ready. All the best!

As a 17+ year LCer, I can remember which induction symptoms I had, but also mentioned in the comments that they don't happen now on LCHF with plenty of salts (after a lapse and back into strict induction).

I also had to check every single one of the carb indulgences shown in Thud's post, but I've learned how to put them behind me & get right back on plan. And to never keep any of these things in may house.

My response to the second question:

all of the above plus Reese's peanut butter cups

Just noticed your post and filled out your survey.

As a new member, you might use the "introduce yourself" forum page to tell other forum members about your study and post another link to the survey. Lots of long time forum members (who might not otherwise notice this thread) tend to read posts there to welcome newbies.

Thank you so much for completing my survey!
I really appreciate that advice I have now posted in that forum so hopefully will generate more replies.

Actually, we prefer that members do not post duplicates or cross-post the same message in multiple forums, as such posts will be removed :exclm:

As suggested, you're welcome to post an intro message, telling us a bit about yourself, your own experience/success with low-carb etc :idea: ... and then include a link back to *this* thread about your survey .. http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=476013. Just for the record, such surveys normally require prior permission from the webmaster (webmaster~lowcarber.org) ;).

Anyway, welcome nutribelle .. and thank you for coming back to follow up. We have allowed other surveys in the past, and the original poster too often just disappears into the ether, never to be heard from again :(


best of luck :rose:
Doreen

Survey done!


Julia

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, nutribelle, but your research methods, vis-a-vis an online survey, are fundamentally meaningless and if you use the results in your dissertation don't be surprised to get royally slammed by your committee.

This type of survey suffers from an extreme and unquantifiable degree of self-selection bias. The only people participating are the tiny fraction of those that have potentially had the opportunity to participate, which is itself a highly-skewed sampling of your target population, and that have gone out of their way to do so. That means that they are very much NOT representative of ANY identifiable population and, in fact, the people that ARE representative are the ones that chose NOT to participate.

Furthermore, the people that are members of this forum are NOT representative of people on low carb diets -- the people here have chosen to join this forum, for a variety of reasons, but the overwhelming majority of people on low carb diets have NOT made such a decision and what separates the two groups almost certainly affects their opinions regarding low carb diets. More to the point, it is very poor research practice to assume that it doesn't and you simply have no basis to even estimate the degree to which it does or does not.

Surveys such as yours represent negative knowledge because they tend to lead you into thinking that you have learned something about your target population when you actually haven't, and that is less knowledge than knowing that you don't know anything about them.

To get the kind of survey results that are worthy of inclusion in a dissertation you need to do a few things.

First, define your target population. You've stated that yours is people that have been on or are currently on a low carb diet. These are two very different populations and are likely to have very different viewpoints. In fact, separating them out and comparing the responses from people that are no longer on a low carb diet to those that are is very possibly a very valid line of research that you might consider. But lumping them all into one group is likely to really muddle your conclusions.

Second, you need to devise a means of approaching a representative sample of your target population. This is not easy to do. The most tested and true approaches are to randomly phone people or to randomly approach people at places that most people in the target population would be expected to go with an even distribution. Shopping malls are a very common location that produce valid samplings for most target populations.

Third, you need to track how many people were approached and what fraction of those that meet the inclusion criteria actually participated. The rule of thumb is that at least 75% need to participate otherwise your data is subject to too-high a likelihood of suffering self-selection bias to be reliable.

If done correctly, you actually don't need that many respondents to get good data. But if done poorly, like you are doing, then there simply is NO amount of data that can produce meaningful results.

And the above quote is the extent of the description we've gotten so far regarding the objectives of the survey request. We have no idea of the variety or extent of the people participating (this forum may be one source of many respondents), if there is an underlying hypothesis being tested, or a clear description of the specific aim or objective of the dissertation. Being an inclusive forum, we typically assume, in good faith, that providing any information helps without judging the rigor or intent of the person requesting the information. Providing the information requested without making unfounded criticisms maintains the respect and dignity of the people who frequent this forum while encouraging continuous dialog, which is the most valuable currency we exchange.

None of that changes the fact that collecting data in this way for an academic research dissertation is fundamentally meaningless regardless of what her aim is -- it is hopelessly and irrevocably distorted by self-selection bias in ways that make any analysis futile.

If she is using other routes to collect data, then even if those routes are valid, she is seriously polluting her data by including anything from survey results collected in this manner. Including it can ONLY lessen the validity of any conclusions she comes to.

I wish her the best in her efforts, but also want her to base her dissertation results of defensible research -- because she WILL have to defend them in order to pass her course of study.

Thank you, Rob, for your wonderfully eloquent post.