survey from the Arizona School of Podiatric Medicine

DB

Barefooters
Mar 18, 2011
69
7
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There's another survey related to barefoot running, this one conducted by researchers at the Arizona School of Podiatric Medicine. See the survey here. It's better than most surveys on the topic, although it's not perfect. Most researchers so far have not designed their surveys to answer some of the questions we might think are the most relevant, and this survey joins that club to some extent. Still, I didn't get the sense that the researchers were necessarily biased one way or the other.
 
thanks for the link, I went through it just to see where it headed. It's completely useless, imo (no offence, I think all online surveys and 90% of 'studies' are pointless) because it's anonymous and anyone (Podiatriac Students and activist Barefooters, for example) can do it multiple times and skew the results. I hope this school doesn't actually publish the findings and claim they mean anything. I'm curious why you think it's better than other surveys on the subject, seems pretty standard to me.
 
I felt it was a bit awkward in forcing a dichotomous choice for running surfaces. I run on both trails/dirt and paved surfaces. Shrug.
...and how many people are going to admit to wearing (or not wearing) something because they're, or to do so, is "anti-establishment?"
Also, would it have killed them to spell out "more than" instead of assuming people all knew the difference between < and >?
 
BFWillie,

I meant that this survey seemed a little better than many of the surveys on BFR that have been mentioned in these forums (when researchers are seeking to recruit participants). So I was speaking in relative, not absolute, terms. The University of Delaware study strikes me as the strongest to date, with its main limitation (based on what I know about it from participating in it) being that it doesn't have a comparison group of shod runners. If they do, then that'd make their work significantly stronger.

Many months ago in this forum I disagreed with a researcher who was trying to recruit participants for his study because he was using a nonsensical definition of injury. The current survey doesn't suffer from this problem. And it doesn't suffer from a number of problems that other surveys promoted in these forums have had, such as inability to distinguish from barefoot vs. minimalist running and lack of information on injury history prior to running barefoot/minimalist, among other flaws.

I haven't tried to respond twice to this survey, but most survey services, like Survey Monkey, enable the researcher to prevent multiple responses from the same computer (as indicated by IP address). Even when that's in place, it can't deter a motivated person from responding multiple times as he or she could just use another computer. So I agree with you that in this kind of situation where there are passionate partisans on different sides, there is the potential for the results to be biased.
 
I felt it was a bit awkward in forcing a dichotomous choice for running surfaces. I run on both trails/dirt and paved surfaces. Shrug.
...and how many people are going to admit to wearing (or not wearing) something because they're, or to do so, is "anti-establishment?"
Also, would it have killed them to spell out "more than" instead of assuming people all knew the difference between < and >?

Yeah, I agree these are problems, but I don't consider them to be fatal flaws. I was not trying to defend this survey, but just let people know about it. Sometimes it can be worth participating in a less than ideal study in the hopes that at least some of the information will be used appropriately and that the weaknesses of the work will be constructively criticized in print by others.
 
I agree completely, that the surveys that are posted here and elsewhere could all use better fact finding methods, but the BRS doesn't "promote" any one study that I am aware of. I do know that I have encouraged people to take part in the University of Delaware study, since Dr. Irene Davis began that study along with Allison Altman. But we encourage as many people to take part in any of these studies as much as possible and hope they will point out to those conducting the studies where they are flawed and where/how they can be improved upon. If we don't take part in any of these studies, someone somewhere will, and then their responses will be those recorded, not ours. The more people who can participate, who actually have anything to do with the reason for the study in the first place, the better. (This is not a BRS statement. This is a me statement.)
 
If anyone who thinks they might put one of these instruments together ever reads these fora forums, I recommend that they recruit some beta subjects to try to fill them out first. It might earn them some higher quality results. Maybe the problem stems from the fact (or my strong opinion) that there are lots of people writing stuff in universties who can't write so easily and they don't have access to anyone who can do some critical editing for them, either. Writing and critical reading are fading arts. Alas, alas, oh, what a world what a world....
 
As a new barefoot runner who hasn't run in 30 years, there's no place for correct responses for me. I quit a long time ago due to lower back and knee pain, but have neither now. No place for that. In college and grad school I did a lot of running , but quit. No place for that either. Both parts of this leave me feeling like I can't take the survey and answer correctly.