Risk aversion in an online community
November 23, 2009 1:57 PM   Subscribe

How risk-averse are the users of ask.mefi, as compared to the population of the industrialized world as a whole? How would I measure this?
posted by trevyn to Society & Culture (4 answers total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: needs to go to MeTa if it's just about AskMe or the site in general, sorry. -- jessamyn

 
I suspect there's a pretty diverse group reading Mefi, but you'll only be able to measure results of those who contribute the most (meaning those who have the time to craft useful answers). Whether the active members accurately represent those who simply passively read is something you'll have to measure on your own. Otherwise, you'll probably just have to parse (maybe via natural language processing) the infodump. Anything beyond that is out of the scope of what Ask Mefi can answer -- i.e. how to correlate things like best answers versus favorites (the former giving you an idea of how risk-averse posters might be versus the latter's aggregate feelings towards the question, assuming favorite indicate agreement).
posted by spiderskull at 2:01 PM on November 23, 2009


Risk-aversion in general is difficult to measure. If you narrow your scope a bit, i.e. financial risk-aversion, physical risk-aversion, etc, you have a better shot at measuring something meaningful.

Wikipedia actually has a decent article about risk-aversion and measurement thereof. I would start there.

This question seems a bit....risky....to me.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 2:02 PM on November 23, 2009


Risk averse how? For example I am paranoid on my IT systems - lots of virtual machines with non-writable partitions and very heavy security, even for just checking email - but you should see how I take a corner on my motorcycle.
posted by anti social order at 2:03 PM on November 23, 2009


Response by poster: Salvor Hardin - Thanks for the clarification request. I'm interested mostly in risk aversion as a social psychology phenomenon; general levels of fear, paranoia, etc. as compared to baseline.
posted by trevyn at 2:13 PM on November 23, 2009


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