DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.28815485
title: 'DOGS' database - partial dataset for head shape-behaviour association

description: <b>Procedure</b>We have conducted two surveys in Germany, both were developed by Jesko Wilke, a freelancer journalist of the German ‘Dogs’ magazine. The data were collected online by the magazine’s own website (www.dogs-magazin.de). The surveys were described in detail in Kubinyi et al., 2009; Turcsán et al., 211 and Turcsán et al., 2017. Both surveys comprised two parts. The first part collected information about the demographic characteristics of the owners and dogs, as well as about the dog keeping practices. Twelve of these questions were the same in both surveys, eight were present in only one. The second part was different in the two surveys. The Survey 1 aimed at measuring the dogs’ general behaviour tendencies (personality) and was developed based on a human Big Five Inventory. This questionnaire contained 24 items (e.g. „My dog is calm, even in ambiguous situations”), for each item the owners were asked to indicate the level of agreement on a 3-point scale (true, partly true, not true). Our previous results using principal component analysis have revealed that 17 items out of the 24 belonged to four components, labelled as calmness, trainability, dog sociability, and boldness, all traits with middle or high internal consistency.The Survey 2 listed 12 examples of typical behaviour problems like „ My dog most often does not even attend me when I call him/her back”. Again, the owners indicated for each statement how far they agree with it using a 3-point scale. The questions were designed to assess not (only) the frequency of behaviour problems of the dogs but (also) the owners’ attitude towards these behaviour; i.e. if he/she considers them as problematic. In the current dataset, we recoded responses into a binary (yes/no) format: responses of "agree" or "partly agree" were categorized as "yes", while "disagree" was categorized as "no".<br><b>Subjects</b>On total, we collected responses from N = 14,004 dog owners in the first survey and N = 10,240 in the second. In the current dataset, we excluded reports with- missing data- duplicate entries (i.e., cases where owners submitted multiple reports for the same dog)- reports on mixed-breed dogs- reports on breeds where the cephalic index of the breed was unknown- reports when the cephalic index of the breed fell between 50 and 53, and between 62 and 65.Finally, to prevent a few highly popular breeds from disproportionately influencing group values, we capped the number of individuals per breed at 100. If a breed exceeded this threshold, we randomly selected 100 individuals for the final dataset.<br>Kubinyi, E., Turcsán, B. & Miklósi, Á. Dog and owner demographic characteristics and dog personality trait associations. Behavioural Processes 81, 392–401 (2009).Turcsán, B., Kubinyi, E. & Miklósi, Á. Trainability and boldness traits differ between dog breed clusters based on conventional breed categories and genetic relatedness. <i>Applied Animal Behaviour Science</i> <b>132</b>, 61–70 (2011).Turcsán, B., Miklósi, Á. & Kubinyi, E. Owner perceived differences between mixed-breed and purebred dogs. <i>PLoS ONE</i> <b>12</b>, (2017).