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In Reply to: That's your prerogative posted by porceleindoll on March 21, 2006 at 16:20:48:
...because I want to support anything that will promote discussion about a very serious health risk for cult survivors.
About your results: You're going have a little trouble interpreting your findings because of the multiple choice question. People who were born into TF don't have a time period before the Family in which they might have contemplated suicide. Are you assuming that 100% of your poll respondents are FGA? That might not be a safe assumption. If a high enough percentage of people responding to the poll are SGA--say 20%--it might appear that suicidal thoughts prior to joing TF wasn't such a big issue for a lot of folks.
A second issue with your multiple choice question for both FGA & SGA is length of time in TF. The longer a person is in the group, the more time & opportunity s/he had to consider suicide. This might not be true for the individuals in your sample, but it's a good idea to control for a variable that could affect interpretation of your results.
Besides asking whether the respondent is FGA or SGA, it would help to know how long the person was in the cult. Then you could see whether these intervening variables (generation and tenure) make any difference where the distribution of your dependent variable (suicidal thoughts) is concerned.
The points I've made don't mean the poll as it currently stands won't provide some interesting results. You've always impressed me as being very smart and inquisitive, and I thought you might appreciate a little feedback on your worthwhile effort. I used to teach research methods, and it's difficult to resist thinking that way when responding to the efforts of an intelligent person.
