Fire Service Research Survey on Tattoos and Body Piercings

Article by Jerry Rhodes

Be careful what you ask for when you ask firefighters for their opinion. The Missouri Valley Division has approximately 1,100 fire departments. To date we have received 471 responses to this survey. Another 488 curious on lookers opened the survey but did not complete it.

We received so much information that we are looking for college student support to process the data, so we can complete a useful report for you. Until the report is available, the raw data will be posted on the MVD website.

What have we learned so far? This should have been two companion surveys, tattoos and body piercings, not a combined survey. There is passion around this subject matter. Our respondent's age ranged from 19 to 71 years. The majority was mid 30's to mid 50's and mostly fire service personnel. We have a good mix of people with tattoos and those without tattoos. The mix of those respondents with body piercings and those without piercings was not as good.

Most agencies do not have policies or SOPs referencing tattoos and body piercings. It will take us some time to answer the more important question, why is that. The individuals that took the survey gave us a lot of information to dig into and data to crunch.

Where the survey addressed safety, there was not a lot of concern over tattoos. There were numerous comments on body piercings. This is another area that will take work to clarify the information we received.

Please describe the type of person / groups that typically get tattoos and/or body piercings? I cannot summarize the answers to this question yet, but the responses are worth your time to review them.

More to come as we dig into this information. Thank you to all of you who took the time to respond to this survey. 

See initial spreadsheet here. (MS Excel File)

Webmaster webmaster@mvafc.org , Information merwick1@aol.com