The dataset described here is a part of my PhD research on Couchsurfing and hospitality networks, the full SPSS-dataset will be available for anyone after my PhD is published (which will happen early in 2015).
In the series of posts on Poisoned Coffee I will provide an overview of the data collected along with some comments. In the first one I will provide basic information about people who participated in the survey, CS use and individual trust in the network.
Second post discusses the negative experiences and motivation to use Couchsurfing.org.
In total 990 Couchsurfing.org users participated in the survey.
The respondents age and gender distribution was the following:
Similarly to the findings of the Stanford research group[1], I observed certain specification in the usage of Couchsurfing: many members use the network either for hosting or for surfing but not both. The experience in the following table is counted in the number of times a user hosted or stayed at other user’s place.
1-2 days are the most common span for one stay arranged through the network. More than two-thirds of all respondents indicated that as their typical visiting time.
During the stay, more than a half of all users (51,7%) say they often engage into common activities with their guests or hosts. 77.9% at least sometimes accompany the guest around the city they live, showing around. 67% of users admitted they maintain contact with people they met through Couchsurfing “sometimes” or “often”. In contrast only 15.9 and 13.8 per cent of people indicated they frequently participate in CS meeting and CS groups respectively.
The Couchsurfing users were asked a number of trust-related questions, one of which was the standard trust-question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?”
It allowed to assess respondent’s trust on a 11-point scale. From 0 to 10.
Mean trust index by country (only countries with more than 20 valid answers are included):
When compared with the control group who did not use hospitality exchange networks, CS users were found significantly more trustful.