Curious questions

For the past four months I have been involved in a scientific study of polyamorous people.  Every month they send me a survey to fill out that usually takes about an hour.  In general I like the idea of improving scientific understanding of people like me but in practice I wonder if the information and conclusions are going to be much use at all.

They ask questions like "how appealing are the alternatives to your relationship with Wendy?" and I don't know what to say.  Do they want to know that computer games are really fun and if Wendy isn't around I will play Hearthstone and be happy?  Do they want to know if I think I could find somebody else to be in a relationship with if she wasn't around?  Are they wondering if I think she is irreplaceable?  I can't tell, so I guess, and then I think that the combined guesses of lots of people are going to be mashed together into well intentioned but ultimately inaccurate summaries, conveyed to audiences with the tagline "New study shows that polyamorous people think that their partners are easy to replace!"

There are also lots of funny / weird questions that relate to bodies and attraction.  They asked me to rate how important my partner's penis size is to me, whether or not the tightness of their orifices is a big deal, and how much I want my partner to be petite.  It seems like they took a grab bag of stereotypical bodily preferences and just asked a bunch of them to figure out what people care about.  My answers in this regard were at least easy to figure out even if I did think the questions were kind of bizarre.  One thing I had to puzzle out was how to answer the question about petite preferences.  I am a big dude, almost exclusively attracted to females, so the question of whether or not I want my partner to be smaller than me hasn't really been a thing.  I am sure if I was middling height I would have more useful thoughts on the matter but since I don't hang around women's basketball stars I just don't know.

I also wonder if they are going to make more of my changing answers over time than they should.  They ask things like "Rate 1-10 how much comfort you get from your relationship with The Flautist" and I can't really figure out how to answer.  I am sure the answer is on the high end, but I honestly couldn't tell you if I should click 7, 8, or 9.  I wonder if they will see a series of answers over the course of the year that vary between 6 and 10 and conclude that my feelings have changed, when in fact they should conclude that the question is extremely vague and my answers are highly random.

Most of the survey, even if it is not perfectly designed, makes sense.  They are asking about my partners and how we interact romantically and sexually.  At the end of the survey there is a page that focuses almost exclusively on how I react to warmth and cold, and it feels bizarre and out of place.  Why does a study about poly people want me to fill in a bunch of information about whether or not I like cold days and how much I want to share warm beverages with people when I get chilly?

I am getting bored with answering the survey questions as the months go by.  I have eight more months to go and picking numbers largely randomly for vague questions for an hour is getting tedious.  I want to contribute but the frustrations with how little good information my answers are actually passing along make me not care much.  I like doing science and usually I enjoy trying to figure out what surveys are looking for in their questions, especially when they try to be tricky about their actual goals.  But this doesn't feel like a puzzle, it feels more like a mess.

Good science is hard to do, especially when you are sending out surveys to large numbers of highly varied people.  I want to help, but the process constantly illustrates how easy it is to screw it up and draw all the wrong conclusions.