In terms of surveys this one is nothing particularly fancy. There is a series of questions where there are variable responses ranging from the simple binary option to the ranged response ending off with optional questions where one can elaborate on what they wish to express regarding their desire to express themselves and any background that may be relevant as to why they may or may not be so reticent to write with the kind of passion one sees in the Romantics of the 19th century who rebelled against the prescribed manner of writing of the rationalists of the Enlightenment who came before them and forever changed the course of the Western canon.

I will list out the questions that I chose for my hypothetical survey that I believe will only scratch the surface of what I wish to cover, but have shortened for the sake of concision and because people tend to not want to fill out surveys when it takes them like half an hour to actually complete the damn form in addition to the tediousness of going through people’s individual answers compared to seeing a table to more easily quantifiable results, though such responses run the danger of removing much of the nuance that tends to be present in people’s minds regarding such a topic as the one we have chosen to explore.

Thus, we come to the binary questions. The questions I have chosen to ask are as follows: Do you keep a journal for your thoughts? Do you think societal pressures help dictate your comfort with your emotions? Do you feel connected with others? Do you feel in touch with your emotions? I believe such questions would provide a minor look at people’s own intuitions and behaviours regarding their feelings about feelings and their actual practice of writing, something that may well be important for better grasping the role of emotion in society and regular people’s relation to it in the writing process compared to a selection of writers who would significantly bias the results as it is my intuition they would say they are very comfortable or at the very least more in tune with their emotions than say a more regular socialised man who is taught to be uncomfortable with their emotions through the social mechanisms in our society. This I believe would be valuable data, though only generalisable to the group of people I choose to take this survey, if they choose to do so and if enough people actually answer the damn thing to satisfy statistical prerequisites.

Now we come to the more typical very somewhat no opinion either way questions where there would be a scale from very uncomfortable to very comfortable. Such questions asked always begin with “How comfortable with…are you?” so it saves us a bit of time to just say the fragments that would complete this sentence. Here is the list: keeping secrets, emotions, expressing emotions. Such questions and the greater range of responses allowed while allowing for quicker analysis of responses would lead to a slightly more nuanced understanding of these very basic patterns of behaviour in people, especially regarding their propensity for holding in their emotions which may well have an effect on whether or not people choose to express emotions through their writing. One may also add as a sort of gazebo to the thing  how comfortable are people with their writing abilities and how do they perceive their ability to write? Such a question would also add some clarity on whether or not people who would be comfortable with expression in a more day to day sense are less comfortable with writing for lack of confidence in their own ability to write.

Finally, we can see the questions about ethnicity and their family life/developmental circumstances as a way to further open up a more multidimensional analysis of people’s predisposition to expression through the written form. There may also be more nuances in people’s feelings about the expression of emotions that may to be encapsulated by the other questions which would also make it an interesting thing to see, if it would take an inhuman amount of time to read and synthesise the intentions and meanings of what a person is attempting to communicate to me in their response on the survey.

Thus I think such a survey with the varying section, though more complex and variable than the simple binary or slide category of survey that I am utilising above, would yield more useful and nuanced results about the sample that chooses to respond to these surveys in an honest and meaningful way rather than in a joking manner, though those may be useful for deriving other conclusions about such individuals who fill out or write in such responses.

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