2025 Fedecan Instance Census is now open

I also wasn't sure how to answer, as a Canadian who lives abroad.

So this was actually intentional, and @Dave@lemmy.nz and I discussed how we could word it in order to let people pick the option that made the most sense to them.

I think a lot of people are in a similar situation as you, and would be making a similar choice

In Toronto, the question "Where are you from?" typically means what's your country of origin. If you respond with "Canada" cause you've lived here for a long time, it's often followed up with "Oh yes, but where are you really from?" In vaccuum that all sounds a bit problematic but in TO more than half of the population is foreign-born so it's an acceptable request for multicultural exchange. 😅

Not an immigrant. Born Canadian with a Scottish last name. I have no Scottish culture in my life, just Canadian culture. Where I'm from: Canada. What is my ethnicity: Scottish. I think.

Ah

We will do some data cleaning afterwards

-3 kids. I have had three abortions. Two conventional, one in the 32nd trimester.

Good to know, we just added some warnings about it. We're trying out FormBricks for the first time with this survey, and this is one of the issues we'll need to look into

edit: We've made the links unclickable in the meantime. The census is long, so I didn't want people to lose their progress near the end. The links are here:

• Speed test: https://fast.com/
• Ethnicity options: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/ref/dict/app/index-eng.cfm?ID=a2_5
• Education options: https://canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/settle-canada/education/school-types/post-secondary.html

In this context, I always open links in a new tab because it's quite a common issue with survey software.

I'm pretty sure it will be much higher here

Definitely! I meant to cross post it and didn't get around to it

I'll share it on !fediverse@lemmy.world and maybe !lemmyapps@lemmy.world in a moment, feel free to share it wherever you want to :)

That's fair!

can't see a reason you need that info

We don't need it :)

Since the community on the fediverse is smaller than other social media platforms, the main goal of the census has been to create some graphs that people can look at. Since Lemmy (and Fediverse platforms in general) avoids collecting any data that isn't necessary for basic functionality, the census allows people to voluntarily share what they want to.

For example, when we first ran the census, we saw that the average user here is indeed older than on other platforms. Or how we have more users from British Columbia than we would expect based on population.

Then over time we adjusted the questions, and generally added more questions based on feedback that people were curious about more areas.

You can see some of those posts here:

https://lemmy.ca/search?q=census&type=Posts&listingType=All&communityId=2&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=true

I can also understand that people are generally cautious about giving out information these days, and we're always open to adjusting things based on feedback. Maybe we can add a question near the beginning to let people choose which sections to display?

Do you have any privacy settings / extensions that might be causing it? I'm seeing results come in from other people

You can choose all answers on multiple choice questions, including choices that are mutually exclusive.

I'll have to add that to my review checklist for next time. At least one of those was an error (ex. It doesn't make sense to be in multiple levels of school currently). For others, it would be clearer to have a single selection with an option for "both about equally" (ex. Desktop vs. mobile usage).

a lack of definitions of terms. Is a town with 150 people "urban" because you have a street address and most people don't work in another town/city, is it "suburban" because you need to go to a different town to buy groceries, or is it "rural" because that's how most people who live there self-identify?

Many of those questions are intended to be self-identification, but we could have said that explicitly so that people aren't uncertain. The reasons we didn't have set definitions:

• People disagree on which definition/method is most appropriate, and we haven't had the capacity to properly weigh the options / determine what value each definition might provide over the others.
• It seems that people are more curious about the self-identified groupings than the exact details. Both factor in to what the online experience is like, but the self-identification would play a larger role?
• Privacy. We want people to feel comfortable answering questions, without worrying that someone will figure out their real identity by aggregating the answers. It's much harder to do that if it's uncertain on why the user answered the way that they did.

Still, we are open to adding definitions to questions where it would make more sense to do so. For example, we added the fast.com and census/gov Canada links this time. Otherwise we can explicitly say that users should answer based on self-identification.

I appreciate the feedback! I've noted this down for next time

a lack of definitions of terms. Is a town with 150 people "urban" because you have a street address and most people don't work in another town/city, is it "suburban" because you need to go to a different town to buy groceries, or is it "rural" because that's how most people who live there self-identify?

The question asked how you would describe your community, but I would call my entire city my community which has a mix of all three options. My house is single-family detached but sits in an urban area, but there's a suburb right across the street from me.

Realistically, maybe a few weeks or a month minimum 😄

Right now the plan is:

• cleaning up the data (removing rows that are clearly errors, tests, or duplicate submissions)
• figuring out the best ways to graph each question
• cleaning individual data rows into a format that's easy to graph
• generating some basic image graphs

Then once we post those, we want to have the interactive version on our site as well. We'll be working through all that during off hours from work / other life tasks

If you have a specific question you want to know the results for, I can give you an approximate breakdown sooner. I assume the data won't change significantly during the cleaning, most of the responses look legitimate