Originally Posted by MM
My first point is probably obvious. It is critical that responses for any given individual are somehow tagged as belonging to that individual, so that correlations among different responses for individuals can be drawn. This doesn’t necessarily mean storing user names, but some key must be applied to uniquely identify the respondent for each answer.
Right. I made sure of that before I signed on to help out with this project :)
Originally Posted by MM
I suggest renaming “erection quality” to “erection hardness.” That will avoid the need for explaining the difference between quality and angle, or other subjective factors. We may want to define “hardness” as rigidity and firmness to the touch.
Excellent.
Originally Posted by MM
Question 8 may be difficult to answer for guys who PE every day. It may be impossible to know whether they’re experiencing permanent flaccid gains or post workout pumps.
Good point. I’ll change it so that it asks guys about their flaccid after 3 days with no PE. If a guy has never taken off 3 days, he shouldn’t answer the question.
Originally Posted by MM
Perhaps we could add a subjective question or two: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with your penis before PE? After PE?
Agreed. We’ve been doing a little work on that “behind the scenes” recently ;)
Originally Posted by MM
Most experienced PE’ers will tell you that newbie gains are a whole different kind of thing than gains occurring later.
I hope we’ll have guys from enough stages of their PE careers (from 1-month-in to 4-years-in) to get a sense of the time course of gains to be expected. Asking each individual for the exact time course of his gains, unfortunately, would make for a labyrinthine set of data to analyze. I’ve thought about some other ways of approaching this question — say, by asking guys about their 3-month measurements — but a host of new confounds seem to arise (I won’t go into detail here…).
Originally Posted by MM
It is also important to tie questions about supplements to the time at which they were taken. Were they taken during the newbie period, or later.
Perhaps this is due to my bias against supplements’ efficacy, but I’m thinking that the supplement section is already complicated enough. Is there any particular reason to think that supplements would be effective for newbies, but not thereafter (or the other way around)? There may be ways to sort-of address this issue without adding a new question…
Originally Posted by MM
1. Should question 4 about beginning LOT be moved to Section I, so it can be with all the other starting specs?
The idea of breaking down the Outcomes & Regimen sections into “summary” and “details” parts is that some participants may never complete the whole survey (data will be saved as they go along through the sections), and we want to put the most important questions upfront, to glean data even from lazy participants. We felt LOT is not of the highest importance.
Originally Posted by MM
. Question 8 should ask about “curvature” rather than “shape.” My shape has changed but my curvature hasn’t.
Excellent point. I’ll change that.
Originally Posted by MM
Question 9 (color) might be expanded upon to distinguish general color of the organ from discoloration markings. My general color is about the same, but I have blackish bands under my circ scar from hanging.
Yes. I think I’ll change it to indicate that either change will constitute a “Yes” answer, to keep things simple here. Good point.
Originally Posted by MM
For question 10, respondents should be requried to have at least 4 or 5 months of PE under their belts before the qualify to answer questions about plateaus.
All right. Will do.
Originally Posted by MM
For question 12, a person can’t know if they “required” a break.
I agree. I’ll look at this again, but I think I had a specific reason for why I asked for this admittedly subjective judgment. I’ll check carefully and will revise if appropriate.
Originally Posted by MM
For question 13, the term, “past injuries” sounds like it might mean “pre-PE injuries.” Perhaps it should read, “Please include each recurrence of an injury as a separate injury for purposes of this count.”
Great observation.
Originally Posted by MM
Under question 1 for “Thrombosed Veins,” are you sure you want to allow people in the midst of a recurperative break to respond? It seems that that will skew the data to a smaller than correct number. I have the same comment for the other injuries.
I’ll take a look at this. I can’t remember it. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Originally Posted by MM
Questions 1 presumes that the respondent proceeded beyond the newbie routine. We should make it clear that that is not an assumption (e.g., add “if you have tried a more advanced regimen” to the end of the question).
Again another great observation.
Originally Posted by MM
For Question 2, is the point to learn something about the effects of consistency or to learn something about decon breaks. If it’s consistency, 3 weeks is probably too long. If it’s decon breaks, I think you should up the time off to at least 6 weeks.
You’re much more expert than I am about physiology & decon. Do you think that 6 weeks is widely agreed upon as a good minimum span for decon? I want to keep this simple by setting some cut-off number. I’ll use 6 if you think it’s best.
Originally Posted by MM
For each type of exercise explored, it is great that you ask how long the routine was used. But we still need to connect that response to a value of gain that came about as a result of that routine. This is what I’m talking about in my comments about Section II above. Also, you need to know when in the respondent’s career the routine was used (newbie or later, especially). On top of that, we need to know what other exercises were done at the same time.
This again gets to the limits of the survey methodology. If we were doing a qualitative study, this is definitely the way it would be done: interview dozens of PEers about their routine orders and all temporal issues involved. As it is, however, this will make for an overwhelmingly time-consuming data-consolidation-and-analysis process using the survey methodology. If I were being paid for this (and had more time for it), I’d gladly try to go that route. As it is, I’m afraid I can’t. Anyone else who wants to volunteer on devising a way to capture the regimens better, please do.
Originally Posted by MM
For question 3 (and others), there is a lot of difference between some of the choices. Perhaps we could use a scale of 1-5 for these types of responses. Also, the last choice in question 3 (just enough to produce a nice pump) presumes that that’s the lowest intensity anyone would use. Sometimes I have to work pretty hard to get a nice pump. This choice ought to reflect very light effort, expressed not in terms of the result (nice pump) but in terms of the effort (light grip, gentle action).
I’ll try to include more levels of choices here. The choices focused on result rather than effort because I wanted the meaning of the terms to be similar across subjects (effort talk is inherently abstract and subjective). I’ll try to revise this though.
Originally Posted by MM
Question 7 (erection level) is problemmatic. It’s just very difficult to compare one guy’s erection level to another’s. Maybe we could propose a more objective “yardstick.” I’ve noticed that “erection level” during jelqing varies as follows: - Penis does not resist compression at base but does expand slightly toward glans as stroke is performed.
- Penis resists compression slightly at base and progressively more toward glans.
- Penis resists compression moderately at base and progressively more toward glans.
- Penis resists compression strongly at base and throughout jelq stroke.
- Penis is very hard and not easily compressible at base and throughout jelq stroke.
Can you please post this as a new thread in the Main Members forum? :) Seriously, this is really important contribution. I have always found the “percentage level” things to be pretty much impossible to interpret. I am MUCH more comfortable with your choices here :up:
Originally Posted by MM
For question 8 (and others like it in other exercise sections), do we want to just say, “How often have our sessions been preceded by no more than 30-minutes with a warm-up. I think the original phrasing was taking other exercises (like stretching) into consideration. People usually stretch before they jelq. Maybe another question is really needed: How long before you begin jelqing do you warm up?
I agree it needs to be specified better. I’m definitely not adding another question here, though. I will revise the instructions. Thanks for another great observation!
Originally Posted by MM
Under “Manual Stretching,” question 2, is an A-stretch the same as a V-stretch? Do we want to use the term “bundled stretch” (not actually sure what that is) or “fulcrum assisted stretch” instead?
I am clueless about stretches. I want more feedback about this. Can someone provide a definitive answer about the best way to group and list stretches?
Originally Posted by MM
shouldn’t the first question allow for 1-week breaks? Maybe we want to ask “how many months” rather than “how many weeks,” to avoid the problem of dealing with a week off here and there.
I don’t really understand your rationale here. Could you explain more?
Originally Posted by MM
Question 4 (under “Hanging”) asks about weight and angle, but only accepts an input for weight.
Must have been an error in transcribing to Wiki. My version here doesn’t have that problem. (It specifies a drop-down list of the angles in #2.)
Originally Posted by MM
Many hangers remove the heat mid-way throught their sessions. Many apply heat in the morning but not in the afternoon (assuming they hang both morning and afternoon). The questions need to probe this.
This is, again, taking the survey to a level of complexity that may be undesirable. I will look back at the questions here to ensure that they have a sufficient level of specificity, so that the respondent can at least answer appropriately (truthfully in a robust sense) even if this is the case (half-time heating, differences between sessions within one day).
Originally Posted by MM
We need some more questions in the pumping section about time and frequency: How long are your sets? Do you keep the pressure the same throughout your sets? How many sets do you do per day?
The question, again, is what approach has the most utility vis-a-vis the analysis stage. I’m not sure how a question such as “do you keep the pressure even” (for which there are two options — 0 or 1) would yield much very useful knowledge, even if the yes-group and no-group differ in their gains. The reason I chose to use “minutes per day” rather than sets and length of sets is that, for most analysis purposes, the #sets and lengthsets variables will probably be reduced to one variable (their product) anyway. Admittedly some prior intuitions are guiding my plan for analysis here: it seems, from my reading of these forums, that most guys agree that total hang time (or total pump time) are more important than the specific way that time is broken into sets (e.g., 10 10-minute sets vs. 5 20-minute sets). Now, of course, the point of this survey is to test whether the “conventional wisdom” is correct in every case, but occasionally we need to rely on said wisdom to make the project feasible. Are there specific physiological theories of PE efficacy that strongly suggest that, for example, two 10-minute hanging sets would differ significantly from one 20-minute set in efficacy? If so, I will do my best to try to incorporate more detailed set info into whichever sections it seems most justified (e.g., hanging or pumping or stretching…).
Originally Posted by MM
Regarding the traction devices, I think their users would say there is a big difference between stretchers and ADS’s.
Yes, my original draft included separate sections for them, but then I wasn’t sure how to group certain things (e.g. PE Weights) so I got lazy :) I will revert to the old design.
Originally Posted by MM
Come to think of it, questions about ADS (I think) really belong in the hanging section. So, I think we should add a new section about stretchers, but put questions about ADS in the hanger’s section.
I disagree here, but it may be due to ignorance. Are hangers the only guys who think ADSs are important to their routines?
Originally Posted by MM
Question 5 would be clearer as “How often have you ejaculated with in 2 hours of completing a PE session?”
Excellent catch.
