sqbr | Geographic location poll

I've been pondering how to do polls about various things in a way which minimises people feeling excluded or otherwise misrepresented. And I think the easiest way to test those ideas out is make polls and see what people don't like about them!

First off, nationality. As was pointed out to me the last time I tried doing a poll on this topic, just because I've lived in the same country my whole life and fit comfortably into it's majority culture doesn't mean other people's identities are so simple. It struck me that asking where people are currently located is a much less ambiguous question though of course you have to be careful not to then make the jump from "geographic location" to "national identity" in the analysis etc (especially since people might be on a three day business trip or something :)).

So! Please do this poll and then tell me anything about it that bugs you.

Poll #3915

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 39

In which geographic region are you currently located?

Africa
0 (0.0%)

North America
12 (30.8%)

South America
1 (2.6%)

Asia
1 (2.6%)

Europe
9 (23.1%)

Oceania
17 (43.6%)

Polar regions
1 (2.6%)

Somewhere at sea
0 (0.0%)

The sky/Space/parallel universe etc
0 (0.0%)

Other
0 (0.0%)

Using Wikipedia's Regions of the World. I divided North and South America since they are two different continents.

Another different question I could ask is "in which geographic location is the place or places that you consider "home" in some significant way?" but that's a bit vague, maybe.

Any alternatives, extra questions or extra answers etc you think would be better?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

'In which geographic region are you currently located?' is really quite a different question from 'in which geographic location is the place or places that you consider "home" in some significant way?' Plus, that second one would need to be a tickybox question rather than radioboxes. For me, anyway. (Also, place or places that I consider home may still not indicate nationality, plus recall that a person may have more than one nationality.)

The one thing that bugged me in this one is actually something that I need to stop being bugged by, which is having to tick 'Oceania' rather than 'Australia'.

Oh they are definitely different questions. It might be worth asking both, it depends on the context the question is being asked in. For me they all get the same answer which makes it harder for me to figure out what questions to be asking.

The one thing that bugged me in this one is actually something that I need to stop being bugged by, which is having to tick 'Oceania' rather than 'Australia'.

It bugged me too and always does, but I decided that if the Germans and Canadians etc had to deal with being lumped together with people from completely different parts of their respective regions then I should have to deal with the pain as well :)

hee! i find it weird to identify myself as being in the same 'continent'/area as hawaii! and it also seems rather arbitrary to say that PNG is part of oceania but west papua isn't? (but then i guess there are all kinds of arbitrary divisions between, say, asia and europe, too?) how do these decisions get made?

Oh it's all entirely arbitrary. One of the things I like about geographical groupings and location is that it's so obviously arbitrary, while some of the other possible ways of asking these sorts of questions seem simple and natural to people with particular identities but are actively exclusionary to others. Of course, the preference for the arbitrary but unambiguous may also be my mathematician's brain talking :)

It's interesting that divisions which to me seem founded on perfectly obvious and important geographical boundaries strike you as arbitrary! I suspect this means that as someone who has been trained in geography I have been inculcated with the same geographers' mindset which informed the choice of boundaries.

Incidentally, the division of New Guinea between Oceania and Asia, is based on the political division.

Geography was always my worst academic subject at school, maps confound me :) I mean it's not completely arbitrary, the boundaries between say North and South America seem relatively unambiguous (unless you live in Panama I suppose) It's much less arbitrary than grouping countries by alphabetical order or something. But it's not as intuitive to me as a non-geographer as some other divisions might be.

Though as I recall the last time I did a poll like this the options were "Australia" and "Other" :D

It's probably not intuitive because the groupings are based on multiple criteria - a complex combination of cultural, political and continental.

For some reason geography is often very badly taught (no reflection on your school intended) which leaves a lot of people confused for life.

I once did a poll of my flist listing every country except the USA which was under 'other', this caused a degree of amusement and revenge amongst the rest of us.

Have I told you about how hilariously awful my geographic knowledge is?

(screened comment)

I thought Edinburgh was in England -- I only discovered it was actually, you know, the capital of Scotland, when we were watching Murder Rooms and I asked why they had Scottish accents.

I'm always momentarily confused when I see that Greece is to the east, not west, of Italy.

I thought the Bermuda Triangle was near Turkey, and that the West Indies were next to Asia.

I always thought the western bit of Mexico was Florida.

Ha, yeah, I'm always doing things like that.

Until relatively recently, I thought Africa was to the west of Europe, so that the middle east was under Turkey. I'm not sure I'd thought about what made up the southern shore of the Mediterranean (Greece maybe?)

Geographic location poll

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