1.
Why have you decided to do these surveys? What do you hope to gain from
this research that will benefit the vampirism, energy worker, otherkin, and therian communities?
Quite simply, we see several needs within our Community as well as others which we
believe we can address through these surveys. There is the
proliferation of published materials which are misrepresentative and
negatively biased against the Community, there is the lack of a
standard in research to hold such works accountable for their claims,
and there are questions which Community members keep asking themselves
and each other, on message boards and online discussions, which deserve
solid answers.
The existing published materials on the Community (and lack of published material for other similar communities) represent a very
discouraging trend among researchers, journalists and academicians to:
a.) Completely disregard common research standards that
require evidence to back up claims made about the subject of one's
writing.
b.) Inject personal observations, prejudices and fantasies into the finished product, in lieu of solid facts.
c.) In the rare cases where sources are cited at all, to ignore
any process of evaluating the sources before using them as "evidence."
For example, in examining the published materials on the Vampire Community
and on real vampirism, one can find pages filled with anecdote,
personal observations, and quotes gathered from roleplayers' websites
being used to describe and analyze the Community. Sources like
roleplaying websites, which are not representative of the Community,
and whose authors are not members of the Community, are being used as
the basis of various writers' analyses of real vampires. Likewise, this holds true for many others including but not limited to the energy worker, otherkin, and therian community.
If any other minority group or subculture received this type of
treatment in print, their work might be fact-checked by an editor,
reviewed by a peer group, or even reviewed and collaborated on by the
group which is the subject of the writing. This is becoming more and
more common in anthropology; the subjects of your ethnography might
collaborate with you, help you understand obscure parts of their
culture, and have a voice in your interpretation of their way of life.
They may even ask for a copy of the book when it goes to press!
However, the Vampire Community and others seem to be groups which can be written
about with no fear of fact-checking, where whatever you say goes,
because no one is there to contradict you or hold you to any standard
of accuracy!
The result of this is a small but growing body of published materials
on the Vampire Community which paint it in an unrealistic, dramatic,
and very negative light. Examples of this are Katherine Ramsland's
"Piercing the Darkness," and Dawn Perlmutter's "Investigating Religious
Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes." These works, if unchallenged, will
represent source material that future researchers might have to go on
when undertaking their own studies of our Community, and they are as
fantastic as they are unrealistic. So, in a nutshell, one stated
purpose of the VEWRS / AVEWRS is to address the flaws in previous
research and refute the more fantastic claims made therein.
Our second stated purpose, therefore, builds on the first - to not only
provide an answer to the previous misrepresentations which have made
their way to print, but to raise the bar for future research. We can do
this in two ways: we can provide a research model that will allow
future researchers to get better access to the truth about the
Community, namely, asking vampires, energy workers, therians, otherkin, etc. what they actually say about their
lives and experiences. And the collected answers we receive will
provide a body of data which has come from real vampires, energy workers, therians, otherkin, etc. If future
researchers want to cite our work, which is really the Community's
work, they will be able to do so; but more importantly, if researchers
and writers in the future wish to make outrageous claims about
vampires, vampirism, or vampire culture (or others), they will have to address this
body of evidence as source material, and explain why their claims
differ. Or, in another nutshell, we are adding this knowledge to the
general body of knowledge on vampirism and energy work, because what has come before is
insufficient and detrimental to real understanding, and we are creating
an environment in which future research will actually have to provide
evidence to support its statements about our people.
We are doing exactly that - making claims about the Community which
will likely refute previously stated conclusions by other researchers,
and we will have sections explaining the reasons for this discrepancy
and why we think our results are more accurate and truly representative
than those of others. These reasons will likely include, "they did not
evaluate or verify their sources," or "the previous claims were
unsourced," and "we came to this conclusion by asking questions of real
vampires, which took into account their backgrounds, belief systems,
and modes of involvement in various aspects of vampire culture." For
example, if a researcher wants to make a claim, say, that "all vampires
are Buddhists," or "real vampires are roleplayers who have taken their
game too far and now live a 24/7 vampire lifestyle," an evaluation of
their work could include a question as to why, in a previously
undertaken and extensive study, the majority of vampires claimed to be
Pastafarians and claimed never to have participated in roleplaying
games. Again, the same principles apply to the energy worker, otherkin, and therian community.
This brings us to the third stated purpose - nevermind outsiders and
academicians; what questions do we want answered about ourselves? We
know that we're not all roleplayers, right? Or do we? The fact is, we
"know" very little about ourselves as individuals and as a Community.
We have plenty of anecdotes; individual conversations on message boards
allow one person to share their experiences with a handful of others.
From observing many of these conversations and from picking the few
sensible resources from the hundreds of webpages, vampires can sort of
glean what it's like for a majority of others - what's normal for
vampires. The fact that vampires keep asking the same types of
questions of each other, and keep sharing data that they find
important, over message boards, is very telling of a perceived need in
the Community for a more thorough investigation of these questions.
Quite simply, we want to be able to collect a lot of individual
vampires' (and others; energy workers, et. al.) answers to these questions - about how involved vampires are
in their Community, and in what capacity; about what it's like to be a
vampire on a day-to-day basis, finding donors, dealing with
sensitivities that regular people don't have, relating to their families and friends, etc. How many times have we all seen someone post
the question to an Internet message board, "does your family know
you're a vampire? Should I tell mine?" We want to be able to do the
same thing with this survey, simply having the data be more widely
collected and be a wider sample of the population. We want to provide a
body of data that vampires and other communities can use to find out about their own people -
to allow the Community to tell itself about itself.
We have undertaken a study that we hope will help the Community learn
more about itself, and enable vampires and/or energy workers to better understand the
conditions of vampirism and/or energy work, by simply asking vampires and/or energy workers about their lives
and experiences and collecting that data in an analysis. We also
believe that in doing this for our own people, we will at the same time
provide a model and a body of data that will raise the standards of
future research and crowd out the misinterpretations previously made by
flooding the market with more accurate information.
2. Why do the surveys attempt to gather data on so wide a range of beliefs and paths? Are they applicable to energy workers, otherkin, & therians?
There are indeed a very wide range of questions asked, not just of
respondents' beliefs and paths, but also of their lifestyles,
memberships in groups, and beliefs regarding their own vampirism and/or energetic work and
their ethics regarding their Communities. We have done this simply to
avoid bias and be able to address the widest possible range of
Community interests and outsiders' claims about the Community. For
example, if one print source claims that vampirism IS a religion, and
another claims that vampirism is a practice of LaVey Satanism, we can't
simply ask "are you a Satanist." It fits our research model much better
to ask which religious paths respondents identify with, and allow for
the diversity that we have seen vampires discuss in the online Vampire
Community by allowing multiple answers. This Community is not, for
example, the kind you can simply ask which church members attend! One
hypothesis that has been posited to us is that we will find a mostly
peaceful co-existence of extremely diverse beliefs within the Community
and within individuals. If the survey turns out to support this
hypothesis, then that is the data that can answer previous
unsubstantiated claims that vampirism is a New Religious Movement of
some sort.
Another example is the wide range of possibilities of
lifestyle choice - House membership, online and offline Community
involvement, and familiarity with specific elements within the greater
Vampire Community. Simply put, we know that all kinds of vampires will
be answering this survey, and we don't want to ignore any one
individual's way of being a vampire. We want to allow all modes of
participation, all lifestyle choices, from the guy with his face on a
House website to the in-the-coffin grandma in rural Ontario. We want to
allow all types of vampires to have a say in what their lives are like.
Therefore, the Community at large, regardless of affiliation, should
realize the opportunity that this survey provides in expressing their
individual or path-specific viewpoints before hastily forming erroneous
presuppositions of maligned intent on the part of our research.
In February 2007 we sat down
and entered in data for questions #172 and #285 and realized we had about 7%
energy work (psionics/psi/reiki/healers/lightworkers, etc.) response and about
5% otherkin response (therian included) that we weren't expecting since the
surveys weren't originally designed for these communities.
By July 2007 these numbers swelled to 12% and 9% respectively and for
the first time we saw a developing pattern between responses given by vampires
versus energy workers versus therians for example... many psychic experience,
medical conditions, spiritual
expressions, energetic related abilities/perceptions, etc. were similar and in
excess of normative prevalence rates in society as reported by a host of other
studies. Instead
of throwing out the
Otherkin, Energy Worker, Therian, etc. responses as "outside the scope
of
our study", we have decided that as a gesture to these communities to
give them data we collect as a starting point for them to be able to
tailor
questions specifically to their own community. Many
of
the questions are related to vampires, etc. and can be answered as “Not
Applicable”, however, for some of these questions we will take into
account a respondent's answer based on a substitution of vampire for
“therian” or “otherkin” for
VEWRS (Part 1) questions #172, #285 (Other: Write In), and on the AVEWRS (Part 2) sections 1, 2, 4, & 5.
3. What about backlash from outside the Community? Will the general
public be made more aware of vampire culture? Could there be an "X-Men
Effect?"
As stated above, the print sources are out there already. Some of
these, like Dawn Perlmutter's essays, papers and book, "Investigating
Religious Terrorism and Ritualistic Crimes," have already been actively
shopped to law enforcement. There have been very disparaging portrayals
of the vampire club culture in widely-available hardcover books, such
as Katherine Ramsland's "Piercing the Darkness," and on popular
mainstream television shows, like CSI (in the episode entitled,
"Suckers"). In general, the public has been bombarded with bad
information about the vampire and other related communities, and there is a real danger
that casual consumers of popular culture will take this as source
material to form beliefs about the Community and its members.
Furthermore, the existence of the print sources suggests that when
specialists in their fields - writers, researchers, sociologists,
anthropologists, scholars of religious movements, law enforcement
personnel, and religious clergy or professionals, likely are already
receiving misleading information. These are people who we especially
want to have true and verifiable data on what comprises vampirism and
vampire culture.
Most of the information available to the general public at
present is disparaging, inflammatory or alarmist. If the mundane soccer
moms of the world were going to rise up against vampire culture, they
probably would have done so after the infamous Rikki Lake vampire
episode, the CSI "Suckers" episode, or after reading news accounts that
falsely painted the Kentucky "Vampire Clan" as participants in the real
Vampire Community. We simply want to balance the plethora of negative
and shoddy information on the open market with a healthy dose of truth.
The next concern is usually, "what if we tell the truth and they use
that against us?" Well, the truth being so much less spectacular than
fiction, what will that entail, exactly? There is nothing in the truth
about vampirism that endangers the Community - we intend to tell the
truth to try to pull the Community's public image out of its current
tailspin which is caused by the wild fantasies about our lives being
portrayed on TV, in popular nonfiction, and in scholarly sources.
4. How will you deal with irresponsible survey responses of a roleplaying or fictitious nature?
Needless to say, there are always such respondents in any public
vampire, energy worker, otherkin, or therian forum, and we expect this survey to be no different. We have
structured the questions so as to be essentially meaningless to those
who want to answer the survey as "Lestat." Some respondents have
noticed questions which have multiple-choice possibilities which appear
to allow for roleplaying-style answers. This is indeed true. In order
to refute claims made by previous researchers, we have to allow these
answers as possibilities. Otherwise, we can't say that vampires DON'T
make these claims, if they weren't given the chance to make them. If we
get a majority of people who really believe the horror fiction novels
as fact, well, we want to know that, too, don't we? Isn't that
something that real vampires would find useful to know about their own
Community?
And finally, we asked some flat-out roleplayer culture questions. Keep
in mind that although we don't know which individuals answered which
surveys, and can't identify individual respondents, we CAN correlate
data from one question with another on the same surveys. We will have
numerous analyses which correlate answers in this way - those who give
roleplay-influenced answers in one section will also have to answer
questions about lifestyle, psychic ability and Community involvement,
and therefore we can make definitive statements on whether or not, for
example, the same types of people who give roleplaying responses also
give answers that demonstrate a familiarity with major elements of
psychic or sanguine vampirism, or those which tell of a high degree
involvement in local offline Community activities. In other words, we
should be able to definitively pinpoint whether those who tend to give
extraordinary or roleplaying answers are centrally involved or
peripherally involved (or maybe even not involved at all!) with the
real Vampire Community. This is something that has never been addressed
in previous survey work - who are the respondents and how deeply are
they really involved in the Vampire Community? Can every respondent's
answer be treated as equally representative of the Vampire Community's
beliefs? Absolutely not - the history of previous research and
interviews with "vampires" in the media has demonstrated this quite
effectively already.
5. Are you going to use the survey results to try to be an authority on vampirism? On energy work? On otherkin or therianthropy? To attempt to "prove" vampirism and/or psionics?
No, our intent is not to prove or disprove vampirism, energy work (psionics), the existance of otherkin, nor therianthropy, and we strongly
believe that only each individual is the authority on his own
vampirism, energetic practice, or personal identity. These surveys are set up to gather data about what vampires and/or energy workers
claim is their own experience. "Claim" is the operative word in that
statement - its set up to measure what individuals SAY is their
experience. This is vampirism in vampires' own words - same applies to energy workers, otherkin, and therians.
We cannot verify the claims that are made in these surveys, since we
can't follow respondents around and make sure they're not lying to us,
and no one will be able to use the data we are gathering to "prove"
that "vampires exist." The questions are specifically set up to gather
data about what vampires say their lives are like. They're not set up
to provide any verification of those statements that respondents will
make, and in fact, some of the aspects of vampire culture, especially
the experiences of psychic vampires, are totally unverifiable, even by
qualified scientists.
What this will be is a body of information that the Community
can point to when outsiders make odd claims about vampire culture. If a
book says that "vampirism is a religious movement," for example,
members of the Community can say, "but when someone actually ASKED
vampires about their religions, the ones who responded said they were
all kinds of religions - what's up with that, then?" So, no, we're not
setting out to do the impossible, we're setting out to collect the data
that people already toss back and forth in informal message boards,
only in a formal and quantifiable way.
6. Are you attempting to authoritatively define real vampirism and/or energy work? To
"explain" or address the phenomenon of real vampirism and/or psionics (energy work) from the
perspective of psychology, genetics, New Age energy theories, medicine,
folklore, etc.?
No, the questions will speak to a research model of actually asking
vampires or energy workers what they say their experiences are, and recording those
statements. Offering the traditional irresponsible and academically
weak "explanations" of the belief in vampirism (whatever form it may
take, and in whatever culture and era) is not only beyond the scope of
the study and beyond our qualifications, but is rife with failures of
logical and academic analysis. Many researchers have attempted to
"explain" the phenomenon of the vampire and energy worker community in the same manner
that folklorists tend to try to "explain" the belief in the mythical
vampires of other cultures. The logical failings that are required to
make, for example, a psychological or psychopathological argument for
the belief in vampires, then or now, should actually be the subject of
another effort entirely. Our follow-up study (AVEWRS) addresses limited
scientific or metaphysical perspectives but remains independent from
the primary VEWRS baseline study.
7. Are you the Government / Press / Reality TV Producers / Inquisition?
No, we are vampires and energy workers. We are also vampires and energy workers who do not happen to
be employed by any of the above institutions. We are doing this for our
Community. Many of us have been "Independents" in the Community for
years, some of us well over a decade. Most of us have watched the
Community come up online, on newsgroups and mailing lists, in fanzines,
Online Services like Prodigy and AOL, and finally websites and
web-based bulletin boards. We have watched the Community grow from
online discussions to real offline Communities of friends. Many of us
have envisioned a project like this for years, but the time or the
Community's level of organization wasn't really right. In the current
state of the Community, we found that we could reach a large number of
both House members and Independents, that we could gather enough data
to make a survey like this meaningful, and we seized an opportunity to
answer the thirst for knowledge that we had observed in the Community
since its inception years ago.
We hope that people in authority will pay more attention to this survey
than to the spurious sources that may have come before. But if we were
those people, we wouldn't need to undertake this study - we already
feel that we know our own people pretty well, being some of them
ourselves!
8. Is your study being conducted by a specific academic institution or under the oversight of an Institutional Review Board (IRB)?
No academic institution is involved with this study to protect the privacy of those involved in the respective communities. IRBs are only required if there is federal research funding
involved. This means that IRBs are usually done when any institution or
academic suspects in the future they may like to receive federal funding. There is no "requirement" governing
such and no incentive for a private group with non-academic staff to conduct
one. In spite of this, we have satisfied
all Federal and institutional guidelines for informed consent when conducting
this anonymous voluntary survey(s); for minors or adults. We aren't Federally
funded (nor would have any desire to be so), representative of a college, or
any other research institution so it's not applicable on its face, however, we
still went above and beyond what was required to word the "Purpose,
Ethics, Privacy, Disclaimer, etc." sections on the actual survey following
established guidelines. Many types of survey research use anonymous
questionnaires returned by mail or placed in drop-box locations. (Remember that
a subject is anonymous only if his/her identity remains individually unknown to
the investigator. Where the identity is known, but held secure from being known
by others, the researcher is maintaining the confidentiality of the identity.)
With anonymous questionnaires, the researcher may fulfill the requirements of
informed consent by providing the subject with a cover letter or set of
instructions that includes the following items, as applicable: An explanation
of the research project, its purpose and duration of participation time; an
offer to answer questions concerning the project and information on how to
contact the investigator; a statement indicating anonymity or confidentiality;
and an indication that the return of the questionnaire will constitute the
subject’s consent to participate (a statement of voluntariness must be
included). These are IRB and consent guidelines and such were followed to the
letter nearly two years ago when we began this study.
These are anonymous, double-blind surveys - we do NOT know,
nor have any desire to know, who fills them out and they are numerically coded
to where your data looks something like this when it's coded in the SPSS
database:
392V; F, GA, 1985, 2, 34, 1, 0, 3, 4, 2, 2, 1, 23, 2, etc.
Furthermore none
of the individual string data is every standalone or not
cross-correlated. Also, if any particular question makes your feel
uncomfortable to answer then leave it blank or provide less information than
asked: ie: Year/Day/Month of birth – just give us the Year only or
Place Of Birth – give us “Seattle, WA” instead of “Renton, WA” or just WA.
9. Can we endorse your study?
No, but you can "support" the surveys; even if you happen to
not agree with all of the questions or viewpoints. Due in large part to
complex ethical and commonly held guidelines in research methodology we
do not encourage "endorsements" of the surveys nor seek them on any
particular web site. This is not to say we don't mind the posting of
the link to the site or discussion, however, the purpose of this
research is to avoid bias within the community with universal
application. While we drafted and financially sponsor the VEWRS &
AVEWRS we in no way intend to imply any other direct correlation
between our personal beliefs and the surveys - we are not doing this
for personal notoriety or profit. The VEWRS & AVEWRS are written
under the premise of uniting the community under a common ideology of
knowledge rather than advocate divided paths, affiliations, or
sang/psi/other ascension beliefs - logic and selflessness usurping
emotions and politics.
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