456,
Welcome to the forums. I hope you can take a little time to stick around and enjoy yourself.
It is going to be pretty hard to get a full standard survey completed this way. Also, keep in mind that you will probably not get a good normal sampling. Some of the questions such as how many knives we buy, or how many $ do we spend are very sensitive (our wives may cause great physical harm to us if they found out
).
The good news is that much information can be had if you run a search on this site. These topics come up individually very often. It will not be perfect, but, it will be fast and probably as accurate as it will ever get.
Regarding your last two questions; Just about all of us start out buying whatever is available from the local knife store(factory). As we become more involved in the hobby, and hopefully older, wiser, and wealthier, we begin to buy better and ultimately this leads to custom knives.
This group likes to play on the web (hence this site) and it tends to buy on the web. Although, we also buy at brick and mortar stores and at local and regional trade shows. You can gage this by looking at the activity on Ebay.com and on Exchange forum on this site. The determining factors are price and availability (some of the knives we collect are relatively rare - and the web is the best way to find them).
Good luck with your paper.
N2S
