I have slightly over 250 valid responses to date, and I continue to advertise online which by itself will get me to about 350 if I'm lucky. I won't do anything else until after 13 June, my last exam, but they still gives me plenty of time to find people to survey.
What shall I do?
I still have quite a few leaflets - about 200 - to I'm going to find eight venues to leave some at. I've identified three strong contenders so far. I definitely don't want to go anywhere to overtly sex-oriented so will be avoiding gay-saunas and the like. I will go to a couple of sexual health services, but the rest will be social venues like bars.
Also, London Pride is coming up. A colleague of mine had the good idea of canvassing people at Pride, so I'll print off about 100 surveys and pre-paid envelopes and hand them out at the event, as well as some of the smaller leaflets I had printed for people who don't want to complete the survey there-and-then.
I can then get rid of the rest of the small leaflets by putting them through people's letter boxes or hading them out on Soho, or Vauxhall or a similar area.
With luck that will push me over the 500 responses mark, which I think will be quite respectable.
All of this restricts (off-line) responses to the London area by and large. I could go to a pride event outside London of course but that will depend on time and money being available to do it. I was a little worried that I wouldn't get too much of a representative sample of guys taking part; but doing an analysis of respondents' postcodes I think I've got a good coverage of the UK so far. Continuing with the online advertising will help keep that balance.
