Hector, I too would like to see a link to the results posted up here when your survey is done. I think its a good project and wish you the best of luck in this and the rest of your studies; there are however a few issues I would like to raise for the benefit of participants;
These are security issues and also the wider effect the results of your survey may have on society as a whole.
1. I am really pleased to see the trouble yourself and your university have taken to keep the data confidential – an A for effort here!
I would have given A* – but there are a few minor loopholes which may affect certain users. Firstly, as your own Universities website mentions (in the Privacy statement), you do not use encrypted (https) connections between your webserver and the participants browser.
This means that if the participant was operating via a LAN or WAN where proxy servers/caches are deployed (or filtering / monitoring software), it would be a fairly trivial matter for sysadmins at the participants end (not Rutgers) to see that someone has been visiting your site, and in many cases identify the user via the authentication data they used to access the proxy server.
I therefore strongly advise participants they do NOT complete the survey using their PC in the office, especially if your employers use web monitoring software! Much of this now looks for keyword patterns, and “MDMA”, “sexual behavior” will certainly trigger some alarm bells. You might not get busted or sacked, but do you really want your boss knowing the deeper details of what you do at weekends?
Save this sort of web traffic for your own home net connection, where provided you don’t break your countrys laws you won’t get in trouble.
In fact the same goes for partyvibe as a whole; if your employers are worried about drug use at work surfing partyvibe from there only hots things up for everyone as some employers pass info on “suspect” sites to the Police and other national security authorities.
A techie note: I think this survey wouldn’t work properly if accessed via a LAN->firewall->router connections anyway as it would only accept an entry for the first user who came via the other side of the firewall and would reject the rest as “multiple submissions” (the router translates traffic from one IP address on the Internet to addresses on the local network).
2. Are you going to have a control group of non drug users being asked about their sexual behaviour? I would advise this out of fairness; one worry I have is that the results of this report could be spun especially by ultra-conservative anti drug campaigners commonly found in the USA to say that “drug users screw around, and spread AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections/burden society with broken families and neglected babies/young children”.
I personally think that those who wish to indulge in “risky sexual behaviour” would do so whether they took drugs or not; after all a former US president became known for this, and he “couldn’t even smoke a joint properly” 😉 !!
Please don’t take this as a personal criticism; as said before I think your studies are a Good Thing; I just don’t want your hard work ending up being used for the wrong purposes.
GL/Reading/UK
