SNARL Survey

Lana Silva

14 May 2016

SOC 122

SNARL Survey

            For our last event, the animal rights group SNARL conducted an online survey on Qualtrics that was distributed via a link on Facebook and emailed to at least 5 classes. A total of 60 people, 36 females, 22 males, and 2 gender non-conforming people, with a median age of 22, completed it. Participants answered a total number of 25 questions, most of which were statements about meat eating habits and about beliefs towards animals and animal rights activists, which participants rated their agreement with on a scale from 1-7. A few of these questions were: Eating meat is enjoyable, Eating meat is healthy, It would be inconvenient not to eat meat, Eating animal products (like meat, eggs, and dairy) directly contributes to the suffering of animal, Hunting for sport is cruel, Animal rights activists spraying furs by people on the street is acceptable, Using animals in medical experiments is a violation of the animals' rights. We also had them rate how much meat they typically consume in a week and their current amount of concern for animal welfare in the U.S. on this 1-7 scale and then asked about their current involvement or likeliness to be involved in an animal rights organization.

            Each participant was given a "Meat Eating" score and an "Animal Rights" score based on the averages of their answers in the two categories. There was a strong negative correlation between the Meat Eating and Animal Rights questionnaires with a Pearson's r of -0.57. As expected and shown in the graph below, typically as one's meat eating score increased, their animal rights score decreased. It was also predicted that the order of the questionnaires would have an effect, with the meat eating scores decreasing if one saw the animal rights questionnaire first, and vice versa; however the order of the two questionnaires had no significant effect. Next semester, I plan to continue doing similar research. In that research and if I were do conduct this survey again, I would want to do so with a wider range of ages and would like to especially focus on the people who are more ambivalent about eating meat. I would also probably like to lead it with an emotional story that was either pro-animal or pro-meat eating to see if that had an effect.