sibling bonds

This Progress Report submitted by Anna and Andy [e-mail:pippiMU@excite.com] on 4/4/01.

Well, we've finally gotten moving on some things for our project. We found a website that lets you make surveys that you can then e-mail to people. So, we made out survey and are in the process of distributing it. We sent it out to three listserves and asked people to forward the address info. to all the people they know so that they can fill out the survey too. We hope to get at least 50 surveys in. We had a few glitches at first - we initially were going to try and make two surveys, one for people with only one sibling and one for people with several siblings. But, we realized that it would make things too complicated. So we decided to simply make one survey and ask people who had more than one sibling to fill out the survey for the sibling they were closest in age to. We also ran into problems when we sent the survey out. Somehow it got erased and so we had to start again. But, we finally got it all done and sent out. Our survey asks basic questions about sibling bonds in hopes of getting a general idea of what the relationships are like. Here's a copy of our survey:
Age:
Gender: Male Female
Race:
Religion:
-How old is your sibling?
-How are you related to your sibling (adopted, step, half, biological)?
-How well do you and your sibling get along?
-What do you like about your sibling?
-What do you dislike about your sibling?
-Do you seek the approval of your sibling? Why or why not?
-Do you share your inner feelings with your sibling? Why or why not?
-Do you think that your sibling understands what you are really like?
-Do you go to your sibling for advice? Do they come to you?
-Do you and your sibling compete with one another? In what ways?
-How often do you and your sibling fight?
-How do you show love or care toward your sibling? (if you don't then -explain why)
-How important do you think honesty is in your relationship with your sibling?
Important
Neutral
Unimportant
-Would you give your life for your sibling?
Yes or No
-Would your sibling give their life for you?
Yes or No
-What do you think are some of the best and most important things about your relationship with your sibling? (if there aren't any explain why)

It was really helpful in making the survey to use a book called Mixed Feelings by Francine Klagsbrun because in the back there was a sibling survey. We were able to use that to guide some of our questions.

Along with the survey we have started to do research on sibling bonds. Taking Chris's advice we looked at journals rather than books and we found several articles where research has been done on sibling relationships where they compare biological sibling pairs with adopted or step sibling pairs. We haven't had a chance to really look at a lot of it but we are in the process of getting it all from the libraries. it should be a big help. Well, that's all for now. More later . ...

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