About a month ago I put up a link to a short, 10 question survey.  I let it run for a month and received 22 responses.  Thanks to everyone who filled it out- I honestly did not expect that many.

While this data may not be representative of all readership, there were some interesting results which I think are important enough to report and maybe encourage other bloggers to do similar surveys.

Question 1: What is your highest level of education?

I expected readers to be mostly younger, but was happy to see that 50% of responders have a masters degree or higher.

This relates to:

Question 4: How old are you?

In %s, that is 36% who are ages 20-30, 14% who are 31-40, 32% who are 41-50, and 19% who are 50+.  It was nice to see this distribution.

Question 2. Is your education in a health related field?

This was split right down the middle: 11 people do work in a health related field, and 11 do not.  I am unsurprised as it seems there are a lot of “casually interested” health blog readers on the web who are looking deeper for answers.

Question 3. Do you currently work in a health related field?

Most responders, 15, do not work in a health related field, compared to 7 who do.

Question 5. How many other health blogs do you read (at least once per month)?

This one was really interesting.

And I naively thought I was in the minority with all the blog subscriptions I have in my RSS reader.  This seemingly implies that blog communities probably largely overlap in their readerships.  This is confirmed:

Question 7. How did you find this blog?

19 of 22 responders reported finding my blog from “a link from another website or blog.” Only 3 discovered it orginally from researchblogging.org.  I expected this as Researchblogging doesn’t really have a large health science community yet.  The fact that no responders found the site through a search engine suggests that either blog readers are networked to other blogs instead of being converted to readers after searching, or (perhaps more likely) the responders to this survey are more “dedicated” blog readers, realize the potential of blogging moreso than casual readers, and are more likely to respond to a survey.

Question 6. If you don’t mind, please name/link to some or all of other health related blogs that you read most.

16 people listed some blogs that they read most.  Here are the top 5 and the number of people who listed them:

Weighty Matters 4
Dr. Sharma’s Blog 3
Obesity Panacea 2
Sweat Science 2
Body Recomposition 2

I enjoy all of these as well.  Some of the other blogs listed I had never heard of so i’ll be checking them out.

Thanks

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to complete the survey, I will make this an annual thing and see if averages change over time.