Survey

I’m one of those people who loves answering surveys and questionnaires. (Am I weird? You can tell me, I won’t be offended.)

I’ll happily sit and answer a questionnaire that will take twenty minutes to complete. I’ll voluntarily sign up to help a researcher with their project. A monthly survey? Sure. (For instance I recently joined the Flu Tracking survey, after the author Greg Egan mentioned it.)

The only problem, as far as I can see, when you do a few of these, is that after a while you forget about them, and when the researcher gets back in touch to tell you about the results of their work, you don’t remember what your responses were. The researcher who’s studying pleasure, pleasurable emotions, and well-being, has published their preliminary results on the National Pleasure Audit.

They mention the top 10 sources of pleasure as rated by the people who completed the survey.

1. Nature
2. Humour
3. Music
4. Reading
5. Alone [spending time alone, I’m guessing]
6. Pets
7. Food
8. Friends
9. Productive [I assume this means: being/feeling productive]
10. Sex

And I found myself wondering how I would’ve answered the survey at the time. I don’t remember! I don’t disagree with any of the things in the list, but I might order them differently on any given day. And at the moment I don’t rate being productive that highly – possibly because I’m about to finish my job, am not feeling all that productive, and don’t care about/don’t want to feel productive for a bit.