As I wrote in How to Motivate Online Community Members I am going to conduct a couple of scientific research surveys on online community user motivation

Some questions that were raised from various webmasters shall be answered here for all:

Q: I think I would do it on the thesis of being totally open with it and letting the members see the research etc.

A: yes – that’s what I planed… everything open… scientifc… and I’m doing this just for scientifc reasons and for my master’s thesis

Q: How will the survey be implemented?

A: it will be done one using opensource software (PHPSurveyor) and results will then have to be statistically processed with SPSS, SAS or similar tools before I can conclude results (not a simple do you like A or B poll but at least 15-20 questions…)

Q: I would need it to be a known 100% guaranteed priority that it would be in english for me to participate

A: YES

Note that I am required to write my full thesis in german, and those full 100+ pages including all theories (like “what is motivation”) will be finished and available in german around Apr 2007

But it’s a 100% guaranteed priority to have everything around the survey and results in english ! I want to publish the results of course for the bigger audience here on marketingfan.com.

that is

• the surveys – of course in english
• the whole empiric part (survey) – that is

* who and what was researched
* what theories and hyptheses will be tested
* what questions were asked

• the interpretation of the empiric part (the survey)

* what are the results and implications of this study???

(that’s a mere 40-50 pages already that I might boil down to a better readable 20pager for english)

I’m not yet sure if I can manage to translate for all the theories part (50+ pages alone) ... these theories that a master thesis (at least in Austria) needs is a lot of generic stuff like “what is motivation?” ... I will probably just provide a set of good references and links to established online resources for the english parts (including a ton of english research papers I’m basing on anyway)

So here’s a guarantee to translate everything related to the survey as outlined above as soon as it’s finished… and VERY probably big parts of it on e the way as we proceed in the research.