In preparing a talk for a workshop I've organized tomorrow, I realized there was one simple experiment that would tie several pieces together neatly. Unfortunately, I hadn't run it. But I figured, hey, I can get data quick on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Turk let me down. I don't know why, but today there aren't a lot of fish biting. So I turn to my usual, pre-Turk subject pool: you. The experiment takes 1-2 minutes -- it's really just 3 questions. As an added inducement to get people to run the experiment now, I'll be posting the results later this week or early next week.
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3 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
5 comments:
The pre-experiment question about highest level of education is challenging for international respondents, because the options include American dialect terms such as "college" and "graduate school" rather than internationally standard terminology. The difference between "some college" and "college" is particularly obscure - I proceeded on the assumption that it means "degree partially completed" vs "degree completed", but that was a guess.
I'm curious what you consider to be international standard terminology. Every country I've been to uses a different set of terms.
In any case, you're right about your guess, though.
Is "tertiary institution" understood everywhere? How about:
- Attend or attended a tertiary institution, not graduated.
- Graduated from a tertiary institution.
- Completed a post-graduate degree from a tertiary institution.
Alternatively, if there are no universal terms, one can always use two or more synonyms separated with slashes, e.g. "college/university".
I'd never heard of "tertiary education". Google suggests that it's not a common term (190,000 hits). "Higher education" is orders of magnitude more common (53,500,000 hits), but not very specific, since it includes graduate school.
How do you feel about "undergraduate education"? The phrase itself isn't that popular on Google, but "undergraduate" by itself is (40,200,000 hits).
The following works for me:
- Have partially completed an undergraduate course
- Have completed an undergraduate course
- Have completed a post-graduate course
In this context, "course" is broader in meaning than "degree". Could always add "(such as a bachelor degree)" if clarification required, or instead of "course" could say "degree or equivalent".
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