Read - The Second PE Survey -- A Thunder's Place group project

The first option would be entered as “0”. If you think we should make it multiple-choice, then the second option could be included also.

0 or 1.

Why can’t the participant enter “0” or “1” or “0.5” (if that’s the best estimate)? I guess the instruction should specify to enter “0” if one’s answer is “never,” to eliminate any possible confusion.

Sounds good. I’ll include that in the next draft.

Sure, I’ll add those. Although I think the first question should specify total caffeine consumption; we can say that a cup of coffee is 3 units, a soda 1 unit, or whatever is accurate… Someone who knows caffeine, please help.

I agree. I’ll be changing all that for the next draft. We lose the potential for maximal accuracy (by allowing exact specification of percentages), but I agree with you that very few participants would have an extremely accurate idea, anyway. Verbal labels are good.

What supplements do you want to ask about? I think the best place to include these is alongside the questions about caffeine consumption and so forth. My only problem with asking about supplements is that it seems awfully implausible that anything besides perhaps smoking or Viagra-type drugs would affect one’s PE success. I’m happy to include questions about various supplements, caffeine, and alcohol, but it’s a trade-off between survey length and thoroughness. What do others think? Should we be asking about all these things?

Yes — you make a good point. I will be sure, in my next revision, to make it clearer to participants, for all the questions, that we are asking them to estimate as accurately as they can, but that we realize not every figure will be exact.

I assume the programmer will provide links to things like this in the final version.

The advantage of allowing participants to fill in an exact figure is accuracy. They can specify the most exact estimate they can provide. I think that for some questions — for example, starting and ending sizes — we definitely should use the “fill in the blank” method. For other questions, where we don’t expect many participants will have very exact figures available — for example, how much of their jelqing was wet jelqing — we should provide nicely labeled options to make it easier for the participant. Does that sound good to you? I’ll put out a second draft tomorrow, probably, integrating the suggestions so far.

Isn’t this covered by the opening instructions? (To skip the question.) But I guess you’re right, it would be nice to have a check-box of “no idea” (alongside the enter-the-blank thing) to make it easier for participants. The programmer can decide how best to do this.

For one thing, it’s always been controversial how much of PE gains can be attributed to simply improving one’s erections, rather than actually building new penis (or pulling more dick out of the body). I’ll probably do some analyses that exclude individuals whose gains may be attributable to improved erection quality…

Yes, that’s the kind of thing I’m hoping the programmer can do so that the survey is minimally visually intimidating.

Agreed. This helps relax the participant, again, and enables him to give the most accurate estimate he can (so long as it isn’t a total wild guess… maybe we should again have a check-box option of “no fucking clue” ;) ).

Good point! I’ll have to make it a more open-ended question about gains or losses during break. Multiple choice seems good here.

These questions are getting at good issues. Could you try to specify more exactly how you think answers from these could be included in analyses of the data?

Great follow-up’s PG! I am glad to hear you will be revising a second draft.

It is my opinion that getting anything below 1 would cause to much calculation and “stress” on the participant. We want it to be easy. However, we could, as you say, include directions in the instructions: 0 for never (or rarely), and .5 for anything less than 1 time per week. I personally think having two little boxes to check would be easier on them, and on us for the analyzing.

Speaking of analyzing
PG, I remember you mentioning you have a program that stores and calculates data. Will your program make it easy for us to analyize? I only ask this because the methods I used to analyze the last survey will not be able to calculate answeres in “number format.” Unless we break it up ourselves…. I am out the door, so I will add more input on this later.

Completely agree — good catch.

Some people have a lot of claims that need to be put to rest. We even have a supplements forum that mention 10’s of supplements that people sware by. Big Girtha, for example, swears by NOX2.
I will make a list of supplements, vitamins, and other nutrient-types that I think should be included tomorrow.

I agree, completely. Some questions, such as what is your BPEL should be blank. Other questions should be multiple choice.

How about a combination of both? In the instructions, we will instruct them to skip all questions they do not accurately know. Additionally for this question, we can have it say in red or something: If you did not measure your base girth, skip this question. Obvious, I know.

Agreed.

Yes. I am currently out-the-door as I write this, so I will write-up a short analysis tomorrow when I get on.

I look forward to seeing the second revision tomorrow.

Yes. We’ll just use some very basic techniques, mostly — regressions & ANOVAs.

Okay. The only problem, remek, is that I doubt we’re going to have enough men for any given supplement category to allow for a good statistical comparison. Still, I suppose it wouldn’t be hard to have a short list of supplements with “check-boxes” next to them to indicate if the participant regularly included it in his PE program…

Remek, I will wait for the things you said you’d add today (Saturday) before revising to a second draft. I hope this won’t be a problem. Keep up the good work.

OK,

PG, and whomever else is following along, I revised a second draft. I figured this is a group effort, and the more each of us do individualy, the more we can do as a team. The second draft is a lot like the first one. I added what we talked about, and changed some other stuff, such as: The lay-out of the sections, added more questions here and there, and changed some of the questions to multiple answer choices (like we talked about).

The lay-out of the sections:
Considering the length of the survey, there will surely be some “lazy’s” that will not finish the whole survey. I don’t want their votes to go to waste, like last time. Thus, I put some of the most important questios in the first half of the survey (such as, how long they have been PEing, and what they gained).

New questions:
I added a new section, and some questions along with it. PG, it is incomplete because I am looking for your input on how to build a list of question to find accurate, analyzable data.

Changing questions:
I mostly changed your last sections questions choices (currently listed as section 2). I added basic modifications. You had the participant enter, 1, -1, and 0 for a choice, and I simply turned it into a “check-box scenario” —- I didn’t know if this is what you originally planned.

Now, there will probably be some flaws is some of the questions (like the first draft), so feel free to PICK-IT-APART.

For organizational purposes, I put the whole second draft on wiki. I want to continue the editing part here, so below this reply I will display the second draft for you guys to edit, add, and criticize.

Few more things before I post the draft here:

I split the percentages into 5 groups (as I originally suggested),
Greater than 95 percent
Approximately 75 percent
Approximately 50 percent
Approximately 25 percent
Less than 5 percent

If you think these could be split up better, let me know.

I think once we get closer to the final survey we should add examples for some questions. Not all of the questions, only the questions the user might have trouble understanding.

More on the analyzing,

Time for the honesty. I remember working with regression & ANOVA’s in college, but that has been years. I can’t remember how these work. I would love for you to “update” me, if you get a chance. I want to make sure we can analyze this accurately. In the first survey, I did simple correlations. Obviously, with your experience and knowledge we will be able to do much more (which I am very grateful for). Additionally, the programer requested these things:

The questions, allowable answers, the flowchart for the questions and answers, and an interdependency map showing the statistical relevence for the answers.

Breaking it down:
The questions:, what we are working through now
The flowchart: The idea of this is that the programer needs to know the flow of questions. For example if we have a hanging section and the first response is “I don’t hang” then you can skip the remaining hanging questions, some relationships won’t be so obvious maybe. He expects this to be built over several pages and for people to be able to start and stop when they like, eventully getting to the end.
The interdependency map is about knowing how question X relates to question Y and whether a pie chart is needed plotting the relationship between the two.

remek,

Your question number 2 needs a way to figure out how long a person took a supplement. You don’t want guys assuming that a large gainer who took L-Arginine for 30 days owes any of his gains to the supplement.

A preview of the second survey

Thank you for choosing to participate in the Thunder’s Place PE Survey!

Please try to answer the following questions as accurately as you can. If you have no idea about the answer to a given question — if, for example, you never took a starting girth measurement, or if you cannot make a reasonably informed calculation of your total hours doing a particular exercise — please skip the question rather than guessing wildly. Use your best judgment about what degree of guessing would be appropriate (e.g., if you remember pumping for 6 to 8 consecutive weeks at one point, “7 weeks” would be a fine answer).

It is extremely important that you answer all questions truthfully. Even if you have lied about any of these matters in your posts at Thunder’s Place, please be honest in this survey. Your individual data will not be connected to your username in the analysis process.

Section I: PE Experience

1. What types of exercises have you used in your PE regimen?
Jelqing
Manual Stretching
Manual Girth Squeezes (Horses, Uli’s, Jelq Squeezes, etc.)
All Day Stretching (ADS, e.g., Monty’s PE Weights, phallosan, etc.)
Hanging
Pumping
Clamping

2. What type of supplements, vitamins, or erection enhancers have you taken during active PE?
L-Arginine (or any salts of arginine, such as the NOX2 products)
Yohimbe
Horny Goat Weed
Tongkat Ali
Tribulus Terrestris
Maca
Viagra (or any generic type: Cialis, Finasteride, etc.)

3. Approximately, how long have you been PEing? Please answer to the week, if you can accurately do so. ____ Years ____ Months ____ weeks

4. During active PE, on average, how many times per week did you complete a PE session? If you exercised your penis more than once a day, count each separate time you “worked out” as one time. For example, if you worked out everday, twice a day, then that is a total of 14 times for the week. ___ times

5. On average, how many minutes did you spend on a PE session? ____ minutes

6. Has your time spent PEing been consistent throughout your PE career?
Yes
No

Right here, I want a list of questions that will allow us to build data on plateaus, punctuated PE, and consistent exercising vs. inconsistent

[size+1]Section II: PE Outcomes[/size]
If the measurement does not apply to you, please skip the question.

1. What was your bone-pressed erect length before beginning any PE? ____ inches

2. What was your erect girth (circumference, not width!), measured at midshaft, before beginning any PE? ____ inches

3. What was your erect girth, at your thickest point, before beginning any PE? ____ inches

4. What is your current bone-pressed erect length? ____ inches

5. What is your current erect girth, measured at midshaft? ____ inches

6. What is your current erect girth, at your thickest point? ____ inches

7. Did you have imperfect erections before starting PE? In other words, do you believe your pre-PE measurements would be greater if you could have achieved a fuller erection at the time?
Yes
No

8. How has your erection quality been affected by PEing?
__ erection quality has gotten worse from PEing
__ erection quality has not been affected by PEing
__ erection quality has improved from PEing

9. How has the shape of your erection been affected by PEing?
__ PEing has increased the curvature of my penis
__ added a curve where there previously was none
__ PEing hasn’t affected my penis’s shape
__ PEing has straightened my penis to some degree [i.e., decreased the curvature]

10. How has the angle of your erection been affected by PEing? ____ (-1 = PEing has lowered my erection angle; 0 = PE hasn’t affected my erection angle; 1 = PEing has raised my erection angle)
__ PEing has lowered my erection angle
__ PE hasn’t affected my erection angle
__ PEing has raised my erection angle
__ I have not noticed a change in my erection level

11. Has PEing darkened or otherwise changed the color of your penis to a noticeable degree?
Yes
No

12. How many times in your PE career have you experienced an injury severe enough to require you to majorly reduce or take a break from your PE regimen for at least 3 days? ____ times

If the participant achieved gains, then the program will direct him to questions 13-15

13. Approximately what is the longest period, after making PE gains, that you have taken off from all PE activities? ____ weeks

14. Approximately how many weeks, prior to the beginning of the aforementioned break period, did you have the size with which you began the break? ____ weeks

15. Did your penis size change during the aforementioned break period?
__ No
__ Yes I gained. How much? Length ___ Girth ___
__ Yes I lost size. How much? ___ Girth ___

Section III: Your PE Regimen

Please answer the questions corresponding to each exercise that has been a substantial component of your PE career; please skip any sections about exercises that have never been part of your PE regimen for at least two weeks.

A. Jelqing

1. On average, how many weeks have you included jelqing in your routine, excluding breaks? ____ weeks Here we should have a small tab that makes easy calculation for the participant that allows them to enter 1 year and 6 months — calculating the weeks for them. This should also be available for question two.

2. How many minutes per day, on average, have you spent jelqing when it has been part of your PE regimen? ____ minutes

3. How many days per week, on average, have you spent jelqing when it has been part of your PE regimen? ____ days

4. During your PE career, what has been the longest period of consecutive weeks during which you jelqed? ____ weeks

5. When jelqing has been part of your PE regimen, is your session preceded by a warm-up?
Yes, Always — 95 percent of the time, or more
Yes, most of the time — approximately 75 percent of the time
Sometimes – approximately 50 percent of the time
Rarely — approximately 25 percent of the time
No — 5 percent of the time, or less

Question 6: When jelqing has been part of your PE regimen, is heat applied during the jelqing session? (i.e. using a heat lamp)
Yes, Always — 95 percent of the time, or more
Yes, most of the time — approximately 75 percent of the time
Sometimes – approximately 50 percent of the time
Rarely — approximately 25 percent of the time
No — 5 percent of the time, or less

Question 7: When jelqing, do you use a lubricant?
Yes, Always — 95 percent of the time, or more
Yes, most of the time — approximately 75 percent of the time
Sometimes – approximately 50 percent of the time
Rarely — approximately 25 percent of the time
No — 5 percent of the time, or less

The same questions we be repeated depending on the participant. The exercises the participant “checked” in the first question of the survey will be used: Manual Stretching, Hanging, Pumping, Extender Devices(Penimaster, AutoEXT, etc.) , Manual Girth Squeezes (Horses, etc.), Clamping, and All Day Stretchers

Section IIII, the last section: Additional PE-Related Variables

1. How many breaks of at least 3-weeks duration, on average, have you taken during your PE career? By “break,” we mean a complete cessation of (or at least a drastic reduction of) PE activities. Enter 0 if you haven’t taken any breaks.
____ breaks
_ I have taken too many breaks to count

2. How many minutes per day, on average, have you spent masturbating or engaging in other sexual activity (e.g., intercourse) with an erection during periods of active PEing? For example, if your average week contains three 10-minute masturbatory sessions and two 30-minute sessions of intercourse, then you average 12.9 minutes per day. ____ minutes per day

3. During periods of active PEing, how many times per week, on average, have you had ejaculatory orgasms? If you never ejaculate (or rarely ejaculate), then enter “0.” ____ times per week

4. Do you ejaculate within two hours of a PE session?
Yes, Always – At least 95 percent of the time
Most of the time, yes — approximately 75 percent of the time
Sometimes – approximately 50 percent of the time
Rarely — approximately 25 percent of the time
No - — approximately 5 percent of the time or less

5. How many tobacco cigarettes have you smoked per day, on average, during your periods of active PEing? If you never (or rarely) smoke cigarretes enter “0.” ____ cigarettes

6. How many alcoholic beverages (equivalent to one beer, one glass of wine, or one shot of liquor) have you drunk per week, on average, during your periods of active PEing? If you never (or rarely) drink alcohol enter “0.” ____ alcoholic beverages

7. How many times have you smoked marijuana per week, on average, during your periods of active PEing? If you never (or rarely) smoke marijuana enter “0.” ____ times

8. How much caffiene do you consume per day, on average, during your periods of active PEing? One soda is one unit of caffiene; one cup of coffee is three units of caffiene; an energy drink is three units of caffiene. If you never (or rarely) consume caffiene enter “0.” ____ units of caffeine consumed per day

9. On the days you exercise your penis, do you use an erectile enhancement pill such as Viagra, L Arginine, horny goat weed, etc?
Yes, Always — 95 percent of the time, or more
Yes, most of the time — approximately 75 percent of the time
Sometimes – approximately 50 percent of the time
Rarely — approximately 25 percent of the time
No — 5 percent of the time, or less

Here we will question regarding the list of supplements the participant stated he had taken

If checked “ADS” as one of the exercises used:
10. On average, how many days per week do you wear an all-day-stretching device (e.g., Monty’s PE weights) during your periods of active ____ days

11. How many minutes do you wear the All Day Stretching device, on average, during the days it is part of your routine?____ minutes

12. At what age did you begin PEing? ____ years old

13. For how many weeks did you follow the Newbie Routine prescribed at Thunder’s Place (or an even gentler beginner’s program) before trying any more advanced PE regimen?
An example of a newbie routine:
5 min hot wrap
5 min manual stretch (ten 30-second stretches)
10 min of jelq (two hundred 3-second strokes)
5 min hot wrap
50 kegels of five second holds each

____ weeks
__ I started with a routine much more advanced than the newbie routine

Thunder, absolutely.

I planned on doing this for each supplement, when we create a few more questions that go more “in-depth” regarding the supplement the participant claimed he had taken.

Besides that, what do you think of the layout so far?
I was going to PM you, to see if you had been following along, and if you fear the survey is to big — when I first saw the rough draft, I immediately thought — woah, huge. But then I reminded myself that the programmer, is going to create the survey with this in mind. He is going to have it so the participant can stop, and continue at anytime he likes. Looking at what we have, and a few more questions that we will have to add, I think the survey will take anywhere from 5 minutes, to 25 minutes to take. That is best, worst case scenario. Worst case being the PEer has tried every exercise, and every supplement.

Agenda:

Edit these questions,

Add the remaining questions (using the “questions we want answers to” as a refrence)

An in-depth edit the whole survey

Acquire multiple opinions on the survey draft

Create the flowchart, and the interdependency map.

Remek,

I’m going to leave this window open and will edit your edit in a few hours :) Thanks for the good work.

I like most of your changes, Remek.

Before I work on another draft:

Explaining stats is a notoriously difficult thing. I’ll link to a few webpages that do a far better job than I could (and save me a lot of time ;) ):

Multiple Regression

ANOVA

(And if you want to go deeper) General Linear Models

I am BY NO MEANS an expert with stats myself. There are a number of members here who have far more facility with statistics than I. I hope that once we have all the data in a spreadsheet they will want to do some data mining themselves, to help uncover non-obvious relationships I may overlook.

I’m not sure exactly how detailed an "interdependency map" the programmer wants. It would help to know how he or she anticipates this will affect the programming. My assumption, when working on the survey, is that the final program will simply produce a nice spreadsheet of data, from which I and others can begin our analyses (aided by stats packages). I anticipate running a lot of analyses (increasing risk of Type 1 errors , of course), since this is more of an exploratory exercise than a hypothesis-testing venture.

And a few critiques of your edit:

I’m not sure I understand the purpose of the new first section entirely. I agree with you that moving the PE outcomes to the beginning is a great idea, so that we might get useful data even from men who don’t finish the survey. Is the new first section you added also aimed at getting a bit of potentially useful data from men who don’t complete the rest of the survey? Most of the questions in it are redundant but less specific versions of questions that we later ask about their regimen. The problem, as I see it, is that answers to these new "summary" questions aren’t really going to yield much specific knowledge about what works in PEing, and they add to the length of the survey.

I’m not sure how useful this question would be for data analysis. I think it might be useful, though, for determining the sections that will show up for the participant during the later "PE Regimen" part of the survey.

I really can’t see how this can be considered important enough to put into the first section. I think it belongs in the last section, with all the other questions similar to it. Also, I again am concerned that not enough participants will have used each of these individual supplements to give us sufficient statistical power (I have no idea what a couple of these supps are!). Do you think it would be reasonable to combine some of these categories?

I’m not sure what the question means.

Do you think Xenolith could help out here? He seems to have specific ideas about how to investigate these questions.

I see the change from "base" to "thickest point." I like this. Although I would be interested in seeing, for example, how much hanging affects base girth, I think your version of the question is potentially even more useful, and we probably shouldn’t include more than two girth questions.

I see you divided "increased the [existing] curvature" and "added a curve where there previously was none" into two categories. I can see how this might yield a good "pie chart," but it causes problems if we want to do quantitative analyses with the data (and you can get a pie chart simply by running a poll in the Poll forum here). I like combining the first two options and assigning them a value of -1 (or +1), the third option a value of 0, and the fourth option a value of +1 (or -1). Thereby we can see, for example, what effect on curvature — on average — specific PE exercises yield. Well, anyhow, we could certainly leave the four options as you have them, but as far as I can tell, the same numerical value will be assigned to options 1 & 2 anyway (via the programming), so it makes more sense to me to combine 1 & 2. I’m open about this though.

Am I missing something, or are options 2 & 4 the same here?? :)

Okay that’s enough for now… I’ll get started on a revised version. Please remember that I was only include criticisms of your revisions above. Most of the changes I liked :up:

Okay, I’m revising the curvature question now, and I realize that neither my original version nor your version above works very well. I think this is a point where we’ll need to first ask the participant if he had a curve before beginning PE…

Oops, and I just realized that the questions about erection quality changes from PE and imperfect PE erections are redundant. If a participant says that his erection quality improved from PE, then we have the essential bit of data I wanted here from the “imperfect erections” question — it suggests that some of his gains may be due to erection improvements rahter than new dick.

Remek, I am changing the “size change during a break” question’s answer options because some guys (though probably not many) may have gained length and lost girth (or the opposite). I think it will be simpler to ask them to enter the exact changes, positive or negative…