First, you may have been selected at random from a set of 605 email addresses from twenty-five American cities and towns. Second, you may have been nominated to participate in the survey by someone else who has already participated in the survey. If so, they had the option to name themselves or remain anonymous. Your information will be combined with the information provided by others to generate a statistical portrait of Email users. In no case will your name or email address be included in a publication.
All information is kept strictly confidential.
Your name and email address will be kept separate from your responses and will never be released to the public or to other researchers. We need to keep your name and email address on file for sampling and linking purposes, but as soon as that phase of the project is concluded we will delete all identifiers collected in the survey. A detailed data security plan was submitted as part of the Ohio State University Institutional Review process, which oversees all research conducted at the Ohio State University. A copy of our IRB plan can be found here . Details on how data are handled are also available in the project proposal .