Reaching the Summit: Social Aspects Involved in Climbing Parnter Selection

I am an Adventure Education student at Unity College in Maine and currently in a social science research methods class. I am an active climber and am very interested into what social aspects go into choosing a climbing partner beyond their technical ability. Your participation is much appreciated and the results will be posted on this pager later.

surveymonkey.com/s/P8ZB5ZH
Click here to take survey

You might get more responses to your survey if you use the "add link" function when you post, instead of asking us to copy and paste.

You're survey has some problems. First of all, you didn't ask anything about attractiveness. My main climbing partner is my girlfriend for reasons that are not mentioned in your survey. Based on what I see at the crags, this is a pretty common situation.

Also asking for "importance" rather than agreement with certain statements makes your questions ambiguous. How important is introversion? If I hate introverted people is introversion very important or not important at all? If I don't care whether or not someone is introverted, does that make me neutral on introversion, or should I say it is very unimportant?

Haha, I do believe attractivness to be a factor in climbing partner selection, but I would not consider it to be a "social" trait. Feel free to comment on that in the free response section of the survey. As for you other comment, it is up for your personal interpretation. I appreciate your interest

what aspects? Attractive female, one who will tolerate my feeble attempts to climb harder, someone fairly close to my capability and energy level, and lives somewhat close by, available for road trips on short notice. There, that's my honest survey response.

Chris90 wrote:...it is up for your personal interpretation.

You'll never get accurate results if you just leave it at that. Danny was trying to give you some advice and you blew him off.

Whether or not someone is introverted is "very important" to me because I don't like climbing with introverted people. It is also "very important" to my partner because he loves climbing with introverted people. We obviously would both answer "very important" for extroverted as well, because I like extroverts and he hates them.

You need to change the wording in that section so that people can choose whether they like climbing with introverts or not, etc. Maybe instead of "important" you could use the word "desirable."

Surveys are hard to get right. But you can't just leave it up to the interpretation of your sample or you'll never get any useful information.

I apologize if it seems as though I "blew danny off". The survey is already underway and it is not appropriate to change things once a survey already has responses. I do not want to tell people how to answer my survey, that would skew the results. I understand what you are saying about the wording for that question, it is rather confusing. But please just make the best of it and if you really have a problem trying to answer that question, just skip it.

What if I only want a partner for cragging and not reaching a summit?

bergbryce wrote:What if I only want a partner for cragging and not reaching a summit?

What if I want a partner that will hoof my oxygen to 8000 meters? Bonati would be my first choice.

This has been very successful! I have over 100 folks that took my survey. Thank you all for participating. The paper and results are being written and anazlyzed now, expect results posted here soon

Seems like the most obvious factor is what your climbing preferences are. I would say that given the option climbers will seek out other climbers w/ similar climbing objectives.

Similar weights.