Gender as one question or four questions
Opened this issue · 3 comments
https://github.com/drnikki/open-demographics/blob/master/doc-source/questions/gender.rst
I sent an email to @drnikki about the gender question(s):
The thought occurred to me that there's actually 4 questions there, but the page says "The Question". This implies to me that it's all or nothing, i.e., you should only be able to add all four questions at once, or none of them at all. Is that the way you intended for this to be used?
Part of the reply:
I think it's not a simple yes/no here. Are there times when you might want to just ask if someone is trans*? sure. I think though, that if you're trying to thoroughly ask someone their "gender identity" and gender history that you might use all 4.
If you only wanted one though, it would definitely be the bottom one. At that point, I think it's worth having a followup question about whether or not trans* and intersex join the checkbox list.
It seems to me that having four separate fields that must all be presented as one group could be challenging in terms of data storage and form presentation (of course, that depends entirely on the framework/language implementing the question). On the other hand, having each question stand alone might not be the best choice, either.
To illustrate my concern: I've been working on the Drupal implementation of the gender question. In Drupal, entity types can have fields added via the UI, and that's the intent with our implementation, to create a module that, when enabled, adds a gender field that can be added to entity types.
Up until now, we've been focusing our efforts entirely on the fourth question, and our module provides that question as a field that can be added to an entity type. If we add the other three fields in the same way, there will be four separate fields, that can all be added, removed, and ordered in any manner the site administrator wishes. They could, for example, ask only the third question, and leave the other three questions out entirely.
That seems less than ideal to me, and so I'm inclined to say that it should be an all or nothing affair, where you can add all four questions as one grouping of fields, or none at all. However, I'm unsure and would like to know what others think.
Hello Alex,
I agree with you by having an all or nothing approach but I want to raise another idea. I was wondering if it is even possible to construct an "if this, then this" statement that could lead the user in choosing the approriate set of questions? Instead of going all or nothing, they'd have a small choice.
If > general gender idenity > Then > Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4.
If > quick survey on housing information trying to poll gender identity* > Then Q4.
* :this part needs work on better wording.
Does that make sense?
Some reasoning why like this approach more is because Q1-Q3 are important, but that is another additional piece of information a person is giving. If you're just trying to understand how someone identifies as "in the least amount of steps as possible", Q4 gets to that.
Thoughts?
@potiyev I think I see what you're getting at, but I really remain uncertain.
The way we ended up implementing it in Drupal is that you can make all 4 questions required, or none of them required, if that helps.
I do think it's best to have all 4. However, I could see a case in which one simply wanted to present the user the last question with all of the options rolled up there.