Bigfoot, Atlantis, and Twitter – A Survey on Canadian Beliefs and Social Media Use

Pic: Screen capture from the introduction to my survey

Have you ever heard about the Chapman University Survey of American Fears? If you’ve read my post introducing you to pseudoarchaeology, than you definitely have heard of it. The header image is a summary of the Chapman survey results! The Chapman survey is really interesting. Researchers at Chapman University wanted to know what American people really thought about subjects like Bigfoot, aliens, and Atlantis, among many other great subjects. So they put together a large survey asking a lot of questions about these subjects and received just over 1200 responses. The data they collected was put together not only into the nice chart, but it was also used in the book Paranormal America. I’m about halfway through the book and it’s absolutely fantastic. I highly recommend it!

Spoiler alert: I’ve been invited to give a public lecture at a Canadian university in October! The topic: pseudoarchaeology and using social media to talk about it. I’ve already written a blog post on the subject, and in my talk I’m going to delve a little bit deeper into how we can use social media. I’m also going to be focusing largely on Canadian cases of pseudoarchaeology. It’s going to be a fun talk and ask soon as I get more finalized details about the times and dates I’ll be sure to share the information with you all! The organizer and I are hoping to get the talk live-streamed, so don’t worry if you can’t make it.

So. Inspired by the Chapman Survey of American Fears and my own upcoming public talk, I’ve decided it’s time to start collecting some number data looking at the connection between pseudoarchaeology and social media, with an especially strong focus on Canadian results. I’m hoping you’ll help me out! I’ve put together a survey largely modeled after the Chapman survey, with a few changes. For example, I’ve added some questions that the Chapman survey didn’t ask. I’ve also included quite a few questions about social media use. The survey is:

• 100% anonymous
• 100% optional

I don’t ask any specifically personal identifying questions. At no point in time will I ever see your name or email or anything like that. I’ve also made every single question optional. I’ve included answer options like “prefer not to answer” in the hopes you’ll still answer it but not feel pressured to have a definite feeling towards anything if you don’t have one to begin with. Anyone over the age of 18 is welcome to fill out the survey. FOr the purpose of my upcoming talk I’ll be focused exclusively on Canadians, but for future conferences I’ll be including data from non-Canadians who choose to fill out the survey. PLEASE share this survey with anyone you think would be interested in filling it out! My goal is to get as many responses as possible. Either share this blog post or the direct link. The survey will be open from July 12, 2018 – September 12, 2018. I’m planning on using this data in my public talk and conference talks, so I’ll be sure to share the results here once they’re in and analyzed. Thank you all for your help!

Link to “Bigfoot, Atlantis, and Twitter: A Survey on Canadian Beliefs and Social Media Use”