The CI 2015 Reader Survey – The Results!

Thanks to everyone who responded to the survey I put out at the end of last year, both to find out a bit more about the site’s readership, and also to hear what you want to see from the site this year. The results are summarised in the image above, but are also shown individually below, along with some brief discussion. Hope you continue to enjoy the posts this year!

It wasn’t too much of a surprise to learn that a lot of chemistry teachers and students frequent the site. Nor was it particularly surprising that the majority of those who visit the site have some level of qualification in chemistry. What was encouraging, though, was that over a quarter of those who completed the survey either had no qualifications in chemistry whatsoever, or had only high school/secondary school qualifications. It’s nice to know that the site is of interest to those who haven’t continued studying chemistry to a higher level, too!

I was surprised to see the large prevalence of readers following the posts via email subscription on this one – though I suspect that people who’ve subscribed in this manner were probably more inclined to fill out the survey, so it’s possible that’s skewed the results on this one slightly. No shock to see that a large number of people follow the posts on the site’s Facebook page, which has the largest number of followers out of all of the site’s social media pages.

This was a question I asked primarily because I was interested in how many of the site’s readers simply view the graphics on social media, and don’t go on to click through and read the article. It was nice to see that the majority do, at least on occasion, click through to read the more in-depth articles too, but also interesting to note that a small proportion of people are still unaware that the graphics come with articles that look at the topics in more depth.

People were allowed to indicate whatever categories of post they were interested in on this one. The clear winner is ‘everyday chemistry’, which is a relief since that’s the site’s general premise. Food chemistry also unsurprisingly ranked highly, but chemical history was an interesting high-charter considering it’s not a category in which I’ve previously made a large number of graphics. Elsewhere, I know that the ‘This Week in Chemistry’ graphics get used a lot by teachers to highlight research in their chemistry classrooms, so good to see them featuring in the top ten responses shown here.

This question was open-response, so though I’ve read them all individually, simply for the purposes of representing the data easily I’ve attempted to categorise them into a range of different headings. A lot of the feedback here was very positive, with a number of ‘more of the same’ responses (or words to that effect). There were also a lot of teachers and students asking for more in the way of reference/summary sheets or resources, which is something I’ll try and work on in the coming year. Food chemistry charted highly here too – if you weren’t already aware, the Compound Interest book, focusing specifically on the chemistry of food and drink, is already out and available to purchase!

Thanks again to everyone who responded to the survey, and I’ll certainly be taking what you’ve said you want to see more of into account over the coming year. In the meantime, don’t forget you can help support the site over on Patreon, which also gets you the added bonus of sneak peeks at upcoming posts.