[Tango-L] Research project: Correlation between cultural identity and tango

[Myk Dowling]

NANCY wrote:
> Your link leads to an Adult Content Warning and requires a 
> registration and password.  Why not just send your opinion directly to 
> the list?
>
> Nancy
>
> --- On *Sun, 2/28/10, Myk Dowling /<politas at gmail.com>/* wrote:
>
>     Well, the first results from this survey are now out:
>     http://home.exetel.com.au/bodypaint/tangoresearch.html
>
>     And here's my thoughts on the results so far:
>     http://politas.livejournal.com/197788.html
>
Ah, yes. I forgot about Livejournal's silly adult rating system. I 
occasionally discuss adult topics on my journal, so the whole thing 
requires that click-through. You shouldn't need a username/password, 
though.  Anyway, here's the meat of the post:

There is some interesting points in this data. First off, we see that 
participants from Argentina are only the fourth most numerous, after the 
USA, Japan and Australia. I would expect that this is mostly due to the 
methods used to advertise the study and the fact that it was an Internet 
survey, so the distribution is more affected by relative usage of the 
Internet between countries than numbers of actual tango dancers. It is 
interesting to see some countries that are quite low on the 
distribution. The UK has Internet usage as high as Australia if not 
higher, yet had five times less participants than Australia. So it would 
seem that tango is far less popular in the UK than Australia.

The gender split is entirely unsurprising, and reflects my anecdotal 
experience of relative numbers.

The age graph is interesting. I wouldn't have expected the 31-40 segment 
to be quite so high, which I consider a good sign.

The occupation graph particularly caught my attention, mostly because 
there seems to be a fairly definite divide between artistic/social 
occupations versus mathematical/technical ones. Information Technology 
is an outlier in that split, but there are two confounding factors 
there. First, and I suspect most important, any Internet survey 
advertised largely through email lists and forums is going to get more 
IT-focussed people. IT people are just more likely to be using such 
communication methods. Secondly, IT is a surprisingly diverse field 
which includes both creative and mechanistic specialities, so you get a 
lot of creative people in IT. In any case, the former factor is likely 
to be of much greater impact.

Also interesting is how few participants chose the "looking for a 
partner/lover/friends" options, compared to the "love of 
tango/dancing/music" options, but again, that may be selection bias. 
People who do tango only to meet someone new are less likely to be using 
Internet discussion media focussed on discussing tango and helping each 
other improve.

Unfortunately, the total numbers of participants is pretty low. I'd like 
to see more detailed analysis of the data, comparing the results of 
different questions. The second page of "responses to tango-related 
words" seems entirely purposeless and random. Perhaps they can tease out 
some significant results if they cross-analyse that stuff with the 
grouping questions, but I doubt there's much to be gained there. If they 
get some really significant differences it could be interesting, but I 
expect it'll be fairly uniform across groups.