CIRCaP wIll Carry-out Internet Survey of the Exile Tibet's Population

Dharamshala: The Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP) at the University of Siena in Italy is carrying out, in coordination with the National Democratic Party of Tibet and with the support of the Province of Siena (Italy), an internet survey of the Tibetan population in exile. The survey will be conducted between February and March 2011 and aims to explore the orientations of Tibetans in the diaspora in relation to the next election of the Government-in-Exile, their attitudes towards autonomy, independence, de-colonisation and other major issues concerning the political future of Tibet.

Since the most effective way to contact and interview a wide and fairly representative sample of the Tibetan population in exile is by using the internet and CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interview) technology, LAPS is in the process of collecting as many e-mail addresses as possible of the Tibetan members or affiliates of associations, foundations, organisations, societies, and cultural centers dealing with the Tibetan issue. To this purpose, we would be very grateful if you could help us in creating such a database, kindly forwarding to us the e-mail list of the Tibetan members of your association or organisation.

To guarantee full anonymity, at this stage we do not need any further information on those persons listed, beside their email. We will use these addresses to invite them to join in our study, submitting to them an electronic version of our questionnaire. Participation in the survey will be completely anonymous and on a voluntary basis. There will be no way to identify the respondents and the results will be used only for the purposes of the study.

If for any reason you do not feel comfortable in providing your affiliates' e-mail addresses to us, we would appreciate it if you could spread this invitation letter directly to your affiliates, kindly asking those among them who are interested in participating to this survey to contact us at this email address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will later return to you with the list of emails of those who have accepted to participate, to double-check their effective membership and affiliation.

We thank you in advance for your collaboration and we strongly hope you will help us in this important and challenging research project.

Yours Sincerely,

Prof. Luca Verzichelli (Dean of the Faculty of Political Science, University of Siena)

Prof. Pierangelo Isernia (Director of the Laboratory for Political and Social Analysis - LAPS)