Hello fellow paddlers!

Wake Forest School of Medicine is currently researching injuries and illnesses in the private whitewater paddling community. We are looking for any meaningful relationships between injuries/ illness and your paddling practices. Our hope is to utilize this research to make paddling a safer sport. We would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to fill out our survey about your paddling injuries and habits. The survey below should take no more than 10 minutes and each response aims to contribute to the safety of the sport.

Whitewater Paddling Research Survey

We want to reach as many paddlers as possible. Therefore, we would ask you to forward the following survey html to members of your paddling community.

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/2215944/Whitewater-Research

Every response counts!

Thank you,
Jamie and Dylan
Second Year Medical Students
Wake Forest School of Medicine

Add Squirt Boat to types and prepare to ruin your survey results.

PFD = NO
Gear & Floatation = NO
Paddle = NO
Footwear = No
Clothing Worn Besides skirt = NO
Is your boat overloaded = Always
have you experienced disorientation on the river = Only when successful.

Some additional questions that could be useful for the whitewater set, or at least I'm interested in the correlations between these and injury rates, not that I have strong prior opinions on all of them:

What percentage of the time are you paddling near the upper limit of your skill level, in terms of river difficulty?

What percentage of the time are you paddling near the upper limit of your skill level, in less challenging water (i.e. playboating, slalom, attaining, etc.)?

How many swims do you have per year?  Per hundred days boating?

When boating near the upper end of your skill level (in terms of river difficulty), how scared are you?  How scared should you be?

What percentage of the time are you near the top of the skill range of your paddling group?

What percentage of the time are you near the bottom of the skill range of your paddling group?

How rapidly are you pushing the river difficulty level of your paddling?

Do you stretch before boating?

Do you exercise outside of boating?

Do you ever think about anything other than kayaking?  When are you going to get a real job?  Do you listen to anything I say?  Are you checking river levels again?  Come on, we're at a nice restaurant.

Do you charge into rapids?  Do you float into rapids?  Do you float upside down into rapids?

How many new sections of whitewater do you run a year?

And finally, when squirt boating, how arc'd is your charc before boating, i.e. when walking and/or driving to the river?  Straight?  A little sinusoidal?  Spirally?  Downright mysterious? Is your charc curvature chemically enhanced?

This research does not require consent because we are not requiring you to provide any personal identification information. If you choose to provide your email address, it is only used to send out swag and is not kept with your response data.