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tronica

Ends Feb 28 - Australian cannabis growers questionnaire

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Hi SA readers

Have you ever grown cannabis? We are conducting a survey of cannabis growers as part of an international collaboration and we'd love it if you could spare 15 minutes of your time to complete our anonymous online survey.

I want to thank the Oz Stoners moderating group for working with me to pilot the questionnaire. The survey is much improved thanks to the input of the moderating team.

Survey link: http://ndri.curtin.e.../research/grow/

And here is the participant information:

Monica Barratt and Simon Lenton invite you to participate in a study on small-scale cannabis cultivation, conducted by the National Drug Research Institute (NDRI) at Curtin University. This study is part of an international collaboration researching cannabis cultivation across Europe, North America and Australasia called the Global Cannabis Cultivation Research Consortium.

The general community typically has unrealistic views about people who grow cannabis. We want you to help set the record straight by completing this anonymous questionnaire.

To participate in this research project, you must:

  • have grown cannabis at least once,
  • be living in Australia, and
  • be at least 18 years old.
Participation involves the completion of an online questionnaire that asks about your experiences with growing cannabis, as well as your reasons for growing cannabis, your personal use of cannabis and other drugs, your views on alternative cannabis growing policies, your drug market participation, your experiences with cannabis laws, your participation in other illegal activities and standard demographic information.

The questionnaire contains 43 questions and typically takes 15-20 minutes to complete. We recommend you complete the survey in one sitting as the session is set to expire after 4 hours.

After the project is complete, we will post a summary of the results here. You can also follow the progress of the international project and ask us questions through our Twitter account.

Your participation is completely voluntary. Once eligibility has been confirmed, you are free to skip any question or choose 'I don't want to answer'. You can withdraw from the study at any time by simply closing your browser. Consent will be assumed upon the submission of data from the questionnaire. After this point it will be impossible to identify your results therefore making it impossible to remove them from the data pool.

The information gathered is strictly confidential. The data will be stored securely at Curtin University for at least 7 years. No identifying information will be collected that could be used to match you to your questionnaire results. IP addresses will not be logged and cookies are not used. For added protection, you are welcome to use an anonymising service (e.g. Tor).

We will present results from this study at conferences and in academic papers. Quantitative data will only be presented in aggregate form. There will be no way to identify individual responses from results presented. Your participation will remain anonymous. Any unsolicited identifying information that you may inadvertently provide in text boxes, such as names of individuals, groups, places or events, will be removed from the data by us in order to maintain your anonymity.

No external funding was sought for this project.


Discussion and feedback are welcome - I'd love to hear what you think of the project. Any feedback will help us to interpret the data and to design better questionnaires next time.

And if you have any questions, please ask! Thanks :)

Edited by tronica

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.

Edited by quarterflesh

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I saw your post about anonymity and I can appreciate the concern. We have actually spent a lot of time making sure this survey is anonymous. We have absolutely no interest in identifying anyone (we don't collect any identifying information). You could consider using Tor and that way you would have an extra layer of anonymity - I have tested the survey with Tor and it works just fine.

Thanks to the couple of people who have already completed the survey... really appreciate your input :)

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Reaserch is golden, thanks Tronica

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edit

:blush:

Edited by tipz

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better then a stoning...get it lol

  • Like 7

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Iran ? huh ?

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Wow that survey was quite indepth and very intense !

Um yeah... how do i change that whole "iran" thing ? I will go into my settings now and see what i can do :P ( i actually reside in the great southern state of Australia )

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Intense, eh! I guess it could be... also depends how many of the questions you qualify for, so it may have been a little longer for you given law enforcement contact.

Happy to receive feedback on any of the questions. We were really happy to collaborate with Oz Stoners - survey was pretty average before they provided some solid feedback, most of which we were able to take on.

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Thanks to those who have completed the survey - perhaps the next project can be about all the other wonderful plants we are growing, as a contrast to the woeful mainstream media clip we've just been subjected to...

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Wow that survey was quite indepth and very intense !

Um yeah... how do i change that whole "iran" thing ? I will go into my settings now and see what i can do :P ( i actually reside in the great southern state of Australia )

 

Hahaha I know of a few people who actually thought you were living in Iran tipz

I didn't correct them :) haha

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Hi folks, just thought I'd update this thread. We have recruitment over 200 people and 144 have so far completed the whole questionnaire.

We will do some more mainstream media over the next month with the hope of recruiting more. but if you know anyone who has grown cannabis, please pass on the link. Thanks :)

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Will do.

And thanks, Tronica, for your interesting and timely work. The discussion generated in your big thread at BL has been extremely illuminating.

  • Like 1

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Cheers Halif. you mean the SR thread? It's insightful for me too. I'm mainly interested in people's perception of risks associated with buying drugs online which seem to vary wildly (as well as trying to ascertain the actual risks, which also seem to vary wildly depending on the situation!).

the cannabis cultivation research has brought me in contact with a completely different crew of people, many of whom have illnesses or are on disability and tend to be much older than the 'partying' groups I've generally dealt with in my research. It's sad that these people have to hide away growing a plant that they believe helps them with less side effects than conventional medicine. The issue of medical cannabis is one we want to highlight with this study as there's been little research on this aspect in Australia.

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I met Monica briefly at mardigrass this year just gone, seemed to be a genuine soul, i hope it wasn't a facade. If people are worried about your anonymity you can use a proxy to do the survey. I really do hope that you, monica, are actually working in an unbiased approach as you stated to us. As you say there are so many people using and growing for legitimate reasons. Mainly to avoid dealing with organised crime groups to get their medicine. I hope that your research, particularly this survey, will be able to demonstrate this to the wider community. Here is to hoping that the source of funding isn't able to taint the outcome of the research as has happened so much in the past.

I hope we may meet again and have a chat about how things are going for you and what is actually becoming of the results of the research :)

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Hi DarkSpark - thanks for the support, hope we meet again too! Even if that doesn't happen in person, I'll definitely be able to present these results publicly once they are in and analysed, etc, and I'll make them accessible to everyone here too.

There is little chance of funders tainting these outcomes given that we did not seek external funding for this project. This means we are able to continue the project and publish results at our own timing and leisure - we don't have to get them approved by any agency before releasing them.

If you happen to know of any grow shop owners that might support this study, please PM me. I can then liaise with anyone who has an interest in supporting the study as we have some small cards which could potentially be included in people's purchases to attract a wider variety of growers.

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Hello to the SAB community... we are still recruiting for this study. If you have ever grown cannabis and you have not already completed this survey, please have a look and we'd really appreciate your perspective.

It's become even more important for medical growers as now that the NSW parliament has launched an inquiry into medical cannabis use, we will use these results to make our submission to the inquiry. So it's an easy way to ensure your experience informs the inquiry if you are not otherwise making a submission.

We also hoping to make it to a sample of 420 Australian completed responses! We are currently just under 400 so we'd love it if you could help us get to the magic number :)

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LAST 3 DAYS OF AUSTRALIAN SURVEY

Since July, we have been surveying Australian cannabis growers. 562 growers have generously given their time and sharing their information, stories and expertise through our survey. We thank all of you for your efforts - it is really appreciated by both of us.

We will be closing the survey at the end of the month - yes, that's this Thursday 28 February.

So, this is your last chance. If you have ever grown cannabis, and have not yet completed the survey, go to http://worldwideweed.nl/ and click on the link next to the Australian flag.

If you know anyone who might like to contribute, please forward them this post.

FYI, we have already done considerable media based on the interim samples both in November and last week. In November, we focused on medicinal use, and last week on the number of plants above which growers can be automatically charged with supply, as well as animals eating crops (which appeared offline in the mX nationally). The Hack story is the most detailed - I recommend taking a listen.

Hack, Triple J [mp3 - 30 mins]
Cannabis growers risk supply charges - Nine MSN
Skippy's getting stones - mX
Backyard pot grown for health - Fairfax (Sydney Morning Herald)

We will be updating you as we progress with formal data analysis. We look forward to presenting more findings and discussing them with you!

Many thanks
Monica Barratt & Simon Lenton

Edited by tronica
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