Observational Blog 7: Survey Results

This week’s homework was creating a survey and dispersing it out to our friends and family. I have realized that even though I thought the questions I asked were simple and self-explanatory, the responses I have received have shown me that I could have been a little clearer. I did not realize it when I wrote the questions and made the multiple choice answers that my questions were unclear. From the responses I received I realized should have reworded a few questions and added another sentence for clarification. A true or false question I used was “The canals are still used today.” Several people responded, “True, but not for their original purpose.” I realized I should have made that clear in the statement. I also found out that the source I used online to base my questions off of turned out to have wrong information. I was lucky though because the two questions still had the correct answer in the other choices. I also made a few errors on the survey I sent to my first group. Due to an error on the computer, it sent the survey before I could fix it. This could have caused confusion on one of the questions on my survey.

I sent my survey out to 44 people and I have received fourteen responses. Eight were female and six were male. I have to wonder why only fourteen people responded to my survey. Nina Simon claims institutions need to ask questions about its visitors that participate in the activities, “If participation is voluntary, what is the profile of the visitors who choose to participate actively? What is the profile of the visitors who choose not to participate,” (309). The majority of people that I sent my survey to are between the ages of 19-25.

The profiles of the majority of my group were college students. Many have jobs, participate in clubs, and have homework like everyone else. There are many factors as to why many people did not respond to my survey. They may have intended to but decided to do it later. Many people do not like surveys and won’t take them even if they are for a friend or acquaintance. People may not have had time or genuinely did not want to take the survey. I realized after reading several responses to the survey how clear one has to be in order to obtain the results desired. I am confident in the future I will be able to create a clearer survey.