Researchers on the board

[wolfvanzandt]

How would ya'll feel about having some of the researchers who are working with the Were community on the board. It would really improve their ability to pick up topics to work with and to figure out how to improve their sampling techniques. We're a hard group to work with simply because of the difficulty of obtaining a reasonable sample, and it's not like we're closed to honest Mainstreamers who are interested in therianthropy; these particular Mainstreamers could actually benefit is quite a lot.

[wildsong]

I wouldn't mind having researchers or any non-therians around. As long as they don't make us out to look like freaks, I don't think it'd hurt anyone.

[wolfvanzandt]

I'm particularly thinking about the Anthropomorphic Research Project and the Therianthropy Research Group.

[Ashen]

I'm fine with it WVZ

[Hopper]

I'm ok with them being here to come up with ideas of things to research and what not but not so much if they are going to take what I post and use it elsewhere. Out of curiosity are guests still unable to view posts here for the most part? I remember when I joined I wasn't able to view the full forum before signing up.

[wolfvanzandt]

Seems to be.

Both of the research groups that have expressed interest have strict ethics guidelines (which they display on their websites). If anything, they are so restricted that they won't be able to do things that we want them to do. That has actually come up in Therian research. I honestly don't think that you will have any problem at all with them on that count and they really want to be cooperative with the Were community so they can get better results. One of the big problems they have is getting a decent sample of the "offline" community. Mind you, this forum is online, but a big focus is building the offline community, so we provide a better "window" to the offline community than, say, oooooooooh, the Werelist.

If you want to check out these two groups, their sites are at:

www.therianthropyresearchgroup.org

and

sites.google.com/site/anthropomorphicresearch/home

And I notice that the last group does not have a copy of their ethics guidelines on their site but I'm sure they would send you a copy if you send them an email (from their Contacts page). And they may even be willing to post a copy here if that's a sticking point. I'm pretty sure that IARP's ethics guidelines are very similar to TRG's. They tend to be very similar from school to school.

[Hopper]

In that case it's all good with me.

[moonbeam]

I'm chiming in a bit late here, but I'm okay with it, too. Even though I'm not terribly active at the moment...

[violet]

Can I just pop in and say being a therian.. I am also one of the researchers from TRG. I didn't join the site to snoop or anything, but there are a couple of us therians on the team who help come up with things to research etc. I've not been participating much lately because my own business has been taking up a lot of my time, plus we decided to home educate our kids so life is utterly chaotic at the moment, but I can assure you we would NEVER take anything people said on this site or anywhere else and use it. We take our ethics very seriously and obviously with myself, I am incredibly aware of how much privacy people in this community like to have. We make that very clear on our website.

I am on this website purely for my own needs and not for the research group's, however I am aware that WVZ has been very helpful in passing on info from the research group and that has been very much appreciated. I actually came back to the site as I felt the urge to and then saw this. I hope you don't think I have been hiding this, I actually alluded to it on a previous post ages ago. I am aware I am not a prominent figure in the therian community and I actually think that works well because I've been watching the community from more of a back seat for years and I and another therian friend were the main 'ideas' people for setting up the TRG and were lucky enough to know the right people to get things in motion. We do the research purely because we are fascinated and want to figure stuff out ( true scientists ). I am happy to be the group's liason on this site if people want. I am pretty much an open book, have absolutely nothing to hide and am very much passionate about furthering research into what it means to be therian.

I am ready for a barage of questions if you so want... again please don't ostrasize me.. I'm just here for me at this point in time!!

[mikhail]

I spent 6 wks at Mayo and have just about every neurological study in existence from full body MRIs, full body PET scans, EEGs, EMGs, sleep studies, and one I forget the name of, but you are covered from head to toe in a powder that turns purple in the presence of sweat, then are warmed in a thermal chamber to 101 degrees, and photographs taken of the entire body at various temperatures to discover abnormalities of the sympathetic nervous system. If an organisation is willing to pay the release fees for each test and maintain anonymity, I'm willing to give releases for copies of the data.

[wolfvanzandt]

Violet, you said you were associated with the TRG from the beginning. That's old news and you've been accepted from the beginning.

And that would be cool Mikhail, but what we need is a bunch of cases. For one, no one would be able to tease the therianthropy from everything else. What might happen later would be a physiological study of Weres similar to the McLean study of clinical lycanthropes - some researcher could access the cases and do a meta study. That could be quite useful.

[wolfvanzandt]

Here's a pretty decent discussion on what researchers have to deal with when studying groups like the Furry community - under the circumstances, it applies to researchers studying the Were community closely.

adjectivespecies.com/2014/04/22/trade-offs-in-furry-research-adjectivespecies-vs-the-iarp/

[wolfvanzandt]

The Therian Research Group's most recent article is out:

Timothy Grivell , Helen Clegg & Elizabeth C. Roxburgh (2014) An Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis of Identity in the Therian Community, Identity: An International Journal of
Theory and Research, 14:2, 113-135, DOI: 10.1080/15283488.2014.891999

It's a small sample study so it doesn't quite capture the variety in the Community but I think it does pick up core issues well and I would refer any professional working with Weres or the Were Community to it as a good introduction.

[EllVacy]

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