The database is complete at 1200 responses!

Today is a very important day and I'm reeling slightly.  Quite simply, I have finished collating the data from five years' worth of questionnaire respondents. It's taken two full days of work but I have done it, and I emailed the file today to be analysed.

I shall tell you the story of the analysis.  It has been an uphill struggle until very recently, when everything fell into  place as if it was all meant to be.

It started in February 2007, when I  decided to upload a truly professional-looking questionnaire, in a form of my own creation, compiled for me by by friend Rob (but that is another story!)  and the responses began to come in almost at once.  I thought I needed a nice big group to analyse and that 500 seemed OK. That took 2 years and by June 2009 I had my 500.

But who was to analyse it? I searched high and low for statisticians and found nothing.  Then I had an idea: the local university - they did the analysis, but I had to complete a 25-mile sponsored walk to raise enough money to pay them.

My home-made form was too full of glitches and often all the data didn't come through to me, so I decided to use a more reliable, online survey. I chose Survey Monkey, and that is where the questionnaire has been - until today!

The message: (4) The womb twin survivors web site

At the beginning of this project in 2003,  I built a web site carrying as much information as I could about womb twin survivors.  This is still there eight years later and much, much bigger.  [See it here] The main idea was to create a place to which people might come who were searching for information about a twin lost before birth. It did not take more than a few weeks for the first person to contact me - a man from the USA who had recovered a sense of his lost twin during NMT therapy.

To this day, over 80% of the people who contact me are from the USA.  Of course the people I am reaching have internet access, and a personal computer, so that limits who I am getting to.

The questionnaire
I also created a questionnaire as an online form in 2004 ( that stretched my IT skills to the limit!)  That created a major attraction and also gave me contact details (unless the respondent decided to remain anonymous) and we could talk some more.  Today, life is quite different with all the new web applications, and things are more sophisticated.  We are on the sixth version of the questionnaire  ( now hosted by Survey Monkey) and 1100 people have completed it.   The Google analysis of the site shows that the questionnaire is the second most popular page.  [see it here]

Information
The most popular page is "information".   This backs up the first principle of this whole project, which is to gather together and disseminate high-quality information about womb twin survivors and particularly the biological basis and medical facts about how a twin may die before birth.  Clearly, this information is badly needed. The first part of my book "Womb Twin Survivors" is a digest of some of this information, which required seven chapters to fully explain. Even then there were dozens more references I could have quoted.

Articles
The next most popular section is the articles.   Some are written by me, fully referenced but never published anywhere else, others have been sent to the web site by womb twin survivors, including Peter Bourquin.

My Womb Twin Survivors Project web site  will continue to develop as I  gather more and more information. The design has changed several times and  I have had to resort to tabs to help people navigate, for it is such a wide-ranging topic.

There are more than 600 million womb twin survivors in the world, (10 % of the population) so we have much more work to do to reach them all! In the meantime the 90% who  do not understand what I am talking about continue to put blocks in my way - but that is tomorrow's story!

The womb twin questionnaire - the sixth version reaches 1000!

All about the womb twin  research project questionnaire, which reached 1000 responses today! 


See it here


Creating a questionnaire

The original purpose of the questionnaire was to clarify the subjective experience of womb twin survivors. This developed into an attempt to produce a psychological profile. At first, there was no way of knowing whether womb twin survivors felt any differently from the rest of the human race.  Until then, the only feelings that had been mentioned in other research with the sole survivors of a twin or multiple pregnancy were “loneliness” and “a sense of something missing.”  That does suggest that the missing twin in the Dream may after all be a real memory, but there was much more to discover.

Part of the work of this project has been to try and put the Dream of the Womb into words. To do that has required a great deal of intuitive guess-work and negotiation, with many hundreds of womb twin survivors over many years.

The emails were a written testimony of how people felt about being a womb twin survivor - this was rare and precious material. If anything useful was to be learned from these emails there were just two options: one was to create a list of the most commonly-used statements in the emails and form them into a questionnaire, in order to find the statements most often agreed to and therefore most characteristic of womb twin survivors generally.

The other option was to collect all the emails and analyse each one to discover the most commonly-stated ideas, according to a style of research known as “Critical Interpretive Research.”[i] This kind of research applies particularly in areas where the use of questionnaires with fixed responses may be limiting. This kind of enquiry aims to characterize how people experience the world, so it is necessarily open-ended.

The first step in this style of research is data collection, which is then interpreted to formulate an hypothesis. In 2003 when the womb twin research project began, it was the only possible way forward, for it was immediately clear that, however much good data was collected, the traditional scientific method of testing an hypothesis was not going to work in this case. 

Testing by the scientific method would have required a significant number of people to come forward voluntarily, who were definitely not womb twin survivors, to complete the same questionnaire under the same conditions, in order to act as a control group. The main problem is that in an unknown number of cases the loss of a twin before birth is symptom-free.  As a result any control group, however recruited, would doubtless include an unknown number of womb twin survivors.

The only reliable place to start was a questionnaire to rate a list of statements commonly made by womb twin survivors.  This was going to be the simplest and least expensive option - but not to fix the questions too soon.  Over five years, six versions of the questionnaire were created and tested on womb twin survivors.

Two types of womb twin survivor

As the emails arrived and a small group of 15 womb twin survivors began to share their stories, it had become clear that much of what they were talking about related strongly to co-dependency.  But this was not the whole story: there were also womb twin survivors with a view of themselves that was almost opposite. For example, one group spent a great deal of time looking after other people, while the other were preoccupied with maintaining their personal welfare. The prevailing feeling for the first group was “abandonment” and “mourning”, but for the second group it was “prevailing anxiety” and “a desire for personal freedom.”  The Mourning group was called the “M-type” (for mourning) and the second group was named the “C-type” (for captive).

Questionnaire Type One:  making a start

To establish the relative size of these two groups, a list of statements was created. They were presented as an online form as a series of 48 statements in a so-called “diagnostic” questionnaire.  For the M-types, some were taken from a list of the characteristic traits common in co-dependency[ii], and there were an equal number of statements that seemed to be characteristic of C-types.  For example, there were two opposite statements about change: “I frequently make resolutions to change my life” (M-type) and “I resist change - sometimes for a very long time.” (C-type.)

Each respondent could vote “yes” or “no” to each statement if they agreed or not. Over the space of one month in 2003, just 10 people completed it. The preliminary results revealed that some statements were particularly popular:

·      I feel different from other people

·      Some degree of personal privacy is very important to me

·      It feels like I am searching for something but I don’t know what it is

There was also another quite unexpected result - half of the respondents checked equal numbers of M-type and C-type questions. It was assumed that this meant that a third type of womb twin survivor existed. After some further consultation with each of them, this group was called the D-type (death), because they seemed to be preoccupied with death and dying.   It was time to test out this new idea.

Questionnaire Type Two: identifying three “types”

A new form was created with ten sets of three statements, in each set one statement for each “type” of womb twin survivor. They were: deep feelings; being normal; attitudes to intimacy; self-esteem; being heard; ways of grieving; the management of anger; shame and guilt; searching and the balance of power.  

For example, the Shame and Guilt set were:

·      I experience a prevailing sense of survivor guilt (M-type)

·      I often feel that when things go wrong it’s all my fault (C-Type) 

·      I hate it when other people make me feel ashamed  (D-type)

·      None of the above seem true for me    

12 people completed this second questionnaire over several months. The results clearly showed three types of womb twin survivor, with the D-types dominating.  Work began on trying to find a set of statements that would reflect the specific D-type experience, but with no particular success. The set of questions that fitted best with the D-Type already existed elsewhere in fact: it was for the “Indigo” children.

“Indigo” children were also called “Millennium” children in a book that relates the existence of these special children to “vanishing twin” phenomenon.[iii]  The so-called “indigo” people certainly do exist as a distinct group and have been studied by experts, because they are hard to educate.[iv] They are in fact of all ages, not just children. There is a questionnaire on a special “Indigo Adults” web site to which the D-type womb twin survivors were referred: they found that most of the statements applied to them.[v] It has been assumed therefore, that there is a strong connection between the D type womb twin survivors and the “Indigo” people.

Finding proof of a lost twin

In the meantime, increasing numbers of womb twin survivors, parents of womb twin survivors and therapists were contacting the womb twin survivors web site and sending in emails. The concept of “proof” became an important consideration, for any one of the respondents could have been fantasizing about their womb twin.  The respondents could have been responding to the existing material on the web site, which at that stage consisted of a brief description of how M-type and C-Type womb twin survivors feel about themselves and how they may move towards healing.  

However, because of the open and sincere tone of the emails and the increasing consistency in the ideas put forward, it was determined to take every email seriously and respond accordingly.  This policy has helped the visitors to the site as much as it has developed the research.

Questionnaire Type 3:  gathering stories

The third version of the questionnaire was given a more sophisticated look.  Some space was allowed for respondents to add as much additional information as they wanted.  34 people completed this version of the questionnaire in eight months.  The stories and additional remarks proved a good resource for extending the number of questions in the next version.

Questionnaire Type 4:  adding more statements

Now that the three “types” had been identified, it was time to develop the questionnaire a little more. The first step was to increase the number of statements to include more feelings, behaviors, attitudes and beliefs. Consequently, the fourth questionnaire had 74 statements. It was completed by 100 people in six months.  On analysis, the favourite statements were found to be:

·      I have a strong inner life, which I use as a coping mechanism

·      I need a lot of personal space

·      I feel restless and unsettled

·      I have been searching for something but I don’t know what it is

·      People think of me as an unusual person

Again, as was shown in the first questionnaire, the issues of “personal space”, “searching” and “being different” were obviously very important. 

It was noticed that many womb twin survivors did not know what medical signs there were that could prove that their mother was carrying twins at some point in the pregnancy.  An extensive literature search was carried out to put together a complete list of the physical signs of a twin or multiple pregnancy which ended in a single birth. [1]

Advice was sought from a database expert, a psychologist and others about how to formulate a set of questions that would produce more reliable data. It was time also to expand the responses from a simple Yes or No to allow for shades of opinion.

Questionnaire Type 5: pregnancy details included

Type 5 gathered the pregnancy data and in addition there was a list of 70 questions about relationships; a sense of self; behavioural problems and mood and motivation. The questionnaire was left in place on the web site for two years. During that time, 200 responses were gathered.

The results showed that, regardless of whether or not there was medical proof of the lost twin, the top 10 most popular statements were:

1.       Deep down, I feel alone, even when I am among friends

2.       I know I am not realising my true potential

3.       I have been searching for something all my life but I don’t know what it is

4.       I fear abandonment or rejection

5.       I grieve deeply and for a very long time after someone close to me, or a beloved pet, has died

6.       I feel different from other people

7.       I have a problem with expressing anger - either there is too much or too little

8.       I feel the pain of others as if it were my own

9.       There are two very different sides to my character

10.  There is at least one room (including shed or garage) in my home that is completely full of stuff.

The “loneliness” and “feeling different” were still there, but some additional, unexpected effects were beginning to emerge, including a tendency towards hoarding, which was of particular interest. These results were presented at the 12th International Congress on Twin Studies in Ghent, Belgium, in 2007.

Questionnaire type 6: the final version

As the questionnaire seemed to be producing helpful results, it was decided to keep it as it was, but refine the questions. Two other frequently-mentioned statements were added, which were, “All my life I have felt something is missing” and “All my life I have carried deeply felt emotional pain that persists, despite all my efforts to heal myself.”  This was to be the final version of the questionnaire, to be made available online until 1000 completed questionnaires  had been received.

The first 500 of the completed Type 6 questionnaires were sent in 2009 for analysis to the University of Hertfordshire.  A preliminary professional analysis of the results was carried out by the Statistics Department.  These were the ten favourite statements:

·      All my life I have felt something is missing

·      I fear rejection

·      I know I am not realising my true potential

·      I feel different from other people

·      I have been searching for something all my life but I don’t know what it is

·      I fear abandonment

·      Deep down, I feel alone, even when I am among friends

·      I have a problem with expressing anger - either there is too much or too little

·      I always feel in some way unsatisfied, but I don’t know why

·      All my life I have carried deeply felt emotional pain that persists, despite all my efforts to heal myself.

We now have 1000 questionnaires completed.

It is now time to explore in detail the results of this four-year research project and examine each statement in more detail. Many thanks to the 1000 womb twin survivors who have been honest and open enough to reveal their innermost feelings about their lost twin to a compete stranger over the Internet by email.  It was a huge act of trust, which I will try not to betray by being very careful about what I say, and maintain anonymity throughout. Without these wonderful people, this research would not have been possible.  Without them, the womb twin hypothesis would still be only an intuitive guess and my new book "Womb Twin Survivors - the Lost Twin in the Dream of the Womb" would have no substance. 

The questionnaire will stay there, but it may be changed a little to include new discoveries.  Its a very good way to make a start on the healing path, so feel free to complete it. I reply personally to every entry.

I now know what kind of research I am doing!

Reading a (very rare) study of bereavement reactions in twins for the forthcoming book,  I found a description of the kind of research that lay behind this study, and in every respect it echoes the methods of my Womb Twin research project. 

At last I have a name for the kind of research I am doing! 

It's a new paradigm, in fact it's known as a "critical interpretive research" paradigm.

This is how I am working: I am doing "qualitative work in an interpretive paradigm. " And all the time those sceptics (and myself) thought I was going about it the wrong way!

Obviously, I can't quantify people's reactions, beyond their own subjective assessment of levels of severity of those statements. I can't find "representative samples"  or a "control group" for a situation that is largely unknown - even to some of the people involved.

Instead, I am exploring personal meanings at an individual level, that may be especially valuable to other researchers in fields of human experience like personal development or bereavement.

Critical interpretive research applies particularly in areas where there has been limited empirical research, where the use of questionnaires with fixed responses may limit findings or where a particular theory (in this case psychoanalytic theory) has dominated thinking and new ideas are beginning to emerge.

A design involving open-ended interviews  by email, enables new or revised conceptualisations. These play a crucial role in identifying the dimensions of interest for further research. The design of my research, using the questionnaire based on the statements made in the stories, and using the stories to create the questionnaire, is a perfect example of this kind of research -  what a relief.

More from Martin packer's  logic of enquiry:

Here is a quote: This framework distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative techniques of data-collection and analysis, on the one hand, and empirical-analytic and interpretive paradigms of inquiry, on the other.

Generally speaking, empirical-analytic inquiry seeks objective metric or categorical descriptions of phenomena, and aims to provide causal explanations of their interrelationship in the form of formal laws tested through statistical measures of association among variables.

Interpretive inquiry aims to characterize how people experience the world, the ways they interact together, and the settings in which these interactions take place.

By and large empirical-analytic inquiry employs quantitative techniques and interpretive inquiry employs qualitative techniques, but the exceptions to this rule of thumb are illuminating. 

See also GROUNDED THEORY  (that's almost exactly how I have been doing this! ) 
Quote:  It is a research method that operates almost in a reverse fashion from traditional research and at first may appear to be in contradiction of the scientific method. Rather than beginning by researching and developing a hypothesis, the first step is data collection, through a variety of methods. From the data collected, the key points are marked with a series of codes, which are extracted from the text. The codes are grouped into similar concepts in order to make them more workable. From these concepts, categories are formed, which are the basis for the creation of a theory, or a reverse engineered hypothesis. This contradicts the traditional model of research, where the researcher chooses a theoretical framework, and only then applies this model to the studied phenomenon.

I dont do the coding thing, I'm  too busy writing and developing the project, but I have always noticed when people say the same things again and again, often in almost exactly the same way. One day  when I have time I will code the thousands of emails - then I may come up with something really excellent that the sceptics will actually believe!

So I have always been on the right track!   Keep sending those emails and completing those questionnaires! Thanks!

The research results!

Here it is - the story so far.  Thanks to the University of Hertfordshire statistics department for their help.
 
Towards a psychological profile of womb twin survivors.

A list of characteristic statements, related to particular attitudes, behaviours, feelings and relationships, was gradually pieced together from stories told by womb twin survivors, mainly by email and mainly though the wombtwin.com website.  This list became the second part of a research questionnaire; the first part being a list of signs and indications of a twin pregnancy, that ended with a sole survivor.  It took many years to create the website because it was difficult to discern what was characteristic of wombtwin survivors from what was simply human nature.

Gradually a short list of commonly-held feelings emerged. A longer list has been gradually collated and pruned, according to how commonly they are felt by the respondents.

Some womb twin survivors have definite proof of their twin and some do not. Only the respondents who had proof were included in this analysis. There were shades of response to the list of statements, fromA which was the strongest to D which was the weakest. Only the As and Bs were chosen. The top five answers, made by people with proof of their lost twin and who answered A or B, were discovered.  The picture that emerges from this analysis is distinct and seems quite reasonable, as long as one assumes that some kind of pre-birth impression of the lost twin does remain in the mind of the survivor. 


76% agreed strongly with: "All my life I have felt as if something is missing."  So many emails  used exactly that form of words. A missing Something may be replaced by things or activities, such as shopping, collecting or even hoarding. A missing Someone may be felt as a deep and perpetual sadness; a seemingly unfounded sense of loss or grief. A missing part of oneself may be experienced as inner emptiness or only being half alive.

73% agreed strongly with "I fear rejection."  Womb twin survivors define rejection as being found wanting or even completely useless and therefore not worthy of attention or love - rejection can also be interpreted as being ignored overlooked and treated by other people, especially those in close or family relationships, as if they "don't exist."  To be ignored and dismissed in this way is experienced by womb twin survivors as being extremely painful. The fear of rejection keep womb twin survivors in unsuitable relationships, they may tolerate abuse for years and may decide to be people pleasers, craving closeness, praise and affirmation.

70% agreed strongly with this idea:  "I know I am not realising my true potential."  The life of the womb twin survivor os characterised by constant acts of self sabotage. Missed opportunities, unmade decisions, unchosen choices all hang heavy and are often ruminated upon - the "might have beens. A sense of the person you could have been;  if only. A yearning to achieve something extraordinary, to reach for the stars and be famous, against which ordinary life seems dull and cheap. A sense of bitter disappointment and let down, both in the way the world is made and in the way one has lived one's life, is common, if not constant.


65% gave a strong response to: "I feel different from other people."  Womb twin survivors are common but they are unusual. One in eight people is a womb twin survivor but that means that about 85%  of the population are not, and are unlikely to be able to understand the feelings of a womb twin survivor. There can be whole families of womb twin survivors over several generations with hardly a living pair of twins among them, but there can be other families and groups where there are very few womb twin survivors: in that case they stand out as unusual, if not weird, and may be referred to as such. 


68% agreed strongly with the statement: "I have been searching for something all my life but I don’t know what it is". The search presents itself as a kind of restless seeking, and may be evident from an early age, . Wombtwin survivors may frequently change jobs, move house or even countries; that may be rootless, travelling extensively; they may constantly forming new relationships looking for that mysterious Something is another person. It is a fruitless search, for what is being searched for can never be found. It is the lost twin, who is lost forever and will not return.


65% agreed strongly with the statement: "Deep down, I feel alone, even when I am among friends." This is a paradoxical kind of loneliness, that has nothing to do with how many friends you have, or how much you may be loved cherished and admired. If you are a womb twin survivor and  are not of the most well known people in the world, it will bring no happiness because there is always that inner, deep sense of isolation and feeling alone. This may be reflected in a practice of self isolation, in pushing people away, as if to deliberately maintain a sense of loneliness.

65% agreed strongly with the statement "I fear abandonment."  Sooner that be  abandoned the womb twin survivor will hang on and hold tight to friends and family, and carefully nurture relationships, even buy friendship. When people leave, this is a problem; goodbyes are extremely difficult.  Just being left alone is very hard. Paradoxcially, to confront this deep fear, the womb twin survivor may suddenly abandon friends and family and simply leave - emigrate to another country, disappear or cut off all contact, leaving a sense of abandonment and bereavement behind them.

There are many other statements in this list. To see the whole list and discover your own feelings for yourself, if you are a womb twin survivor, do try the questionnaire yourself. Just go to my website and click "research."

More soon.

Hoarding behaviour

Well I have said it before and I'll say it again: wombtwin survivors tend to be hoarders. More than half of the questionnaire responders voted as A to:

There is at least one room in my home, including a shed or garage, that is completely full of stuff.

However, a further 25% of them gave that idea a fat zero. So why are so many wombtwin survivors significant hoarders and yet others not all all? A mystery. I'm examining the questionnaire results carefully to see what I can find but Im no statistician.

BTW: I am almost up to the 300 mark, and scientists say 300 is a reliable cohort worthy of analysis, so if you haven't done it yet, do have a go! (click here to do it now)

So, to take this a little further, I have set up another online form, this time with WUFOO who are completely wonderful and organise your surveys for you in a way I could not have dreamed of five years ago when I first set up the reserach questionnaire.

If you click here you will find a simple little survey asking you to respond to questions about your own hoarding behavior, just to give me a clearer idea. Do try it. If you think you have already guessed why your hoarding is linked to being a wombtwin survivor, then please leave a comment and lets talk about this.

In fact, all comments are welcomed, as always.

Some statistics

I have been counting. It's all because my address book crashed and I had to rebuild it. It made me realise how many people have now come forward in relation to this project, almost all of them wombtwin survivors.

Here are the statistics to date.

1. The present website went up on February 2007. I started the hit counter at 1000. It reads 14817 (that's new hits, not re-visits) today.

2. I have been making questionnaires since the Spring of 2003. To date, 716 forms have been completed and received by me.

(The sixth revision was launched Feb 2007, and 268 people have completed it. It will remain exactly as it is with no revision until 1000 people have completed it. We are about to start building a database from this data, so we can get some good statistics. Any experts on using SPSS with Access, who are willing to help, please email me! )

3. I have 268 email addresses on the list to receive GEMINI VOICES, our monthly email newsletter.

4. Since July 2007, 20 people have joined us as members, and 14 people have joined as associates of Wombtwin.com.

(It's free, so if you believe in what we are doing here, click here to become an associate!)

Clearly, we are growing.