by Primus Aurelius Timavus on Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:17 am
Tom,
I found your request rather disconcerting. After all, members of this forum do not know you. You also gave very little information regarding why you are requesting personal data. You might start by letting us know why you picked the Societas for your study.
From our postings and other information given at this site, it would not be hard to track down the true names of our sodales (members), and a lot can be done on the Internet with someone's name, age, and gender. Perhaps I am more private than most, but I routinely give a false age or false birthdate when filling out the "required" fields of online forms.
May I suggest that you do not ask for specific ages, but rather for broad categories such as "26-30" and "31-35".
If your study is quantitative, you would have to use a dummy variable rather than a continuous variable when running a regression, for example, but this is an accepted technique (you would have to do that for gender anyway).
Tergestus
Primus Aurelius Timavus
Curator, Rogator, Praetor et Patricius
Civis Romanus Sum