So for our latest assignment, my class is collecting survey data from students at our university, with our focus being the same or related to our archival research. (Funnily enough, I just took a ton of surveys as part of of my psychology class.) As said before my focus revolves around undergraduate knowledge of archives and archival knowledge, thus my main goal going forward is gauging the extent of this knowledge among undergrads at my school. I plan to generally distribute my survey online to a variety of people across class years, and I’ll try to avoid distributing to my own class to prevent bias. Since, you know, we just learned about the archives.
There will probably be questions on their ability to locate the archives, if they even know the archives exist, and if they participate in the stereotype that archives are only available for research/grad student/professional use. If all things go well, I’ll end up with data which reflects my own experiences concerning archival research. That is, hardly any undergrads know anything concerning the archives. However, because I’m not using random assignment and random selection, the data I receive will have some bias, as bias hasn’t been eliminated (shoutout to Psychology 1 for that lesson on conducting experiments).


