As a part of an upcoming research paper for my english class, I sent out my first survey and found some interesting data.
My first order of business was creating “good” survey questions. This means that questions had to fit a certain set of criteria to be considered good to get the exact kind of data that you’re looking for in the research process— after I sent out my survey, I found that some questions were not well formulated giving me answers that I do not know how to interpret.
So I began my survey with questions of age and gender to get a sense of who was filling it out since I put it on Facebook rather than distributing the survey out to college aged people on campus.
I chose to distribute my survey on Facebook to find data for my research paper simply because..
- I didn’t want to go up to people in person and ask them to fill out my survey.
- My friends in real life love me so they would fill out a survey on FB for me.
It was as simple as that… or so I thought.
Then, there was a major mistake that turned into a “catastrophe” as one of my FB friends jokingly pointed out
The said catastrophe was a misplaced apostrophe on the word “you’re”. Instead of the correct way, I wrote “your’e”.
An honest mistake turned into heartless backlash from my so-called “friends” that I trusted to fill out the survey…. little did I know, such a seemingly small typing mistake would mean so much.
I think that because my chosen audience was my Facebook friends, they were able to criticize a minor error because it was a my friends poking fun at me. It didn’t actually bother me because who really cares about a typo??
but… this does show the importance of how one creates a survey and it shows that little errors are important. Furthermore, my friends know who I am and would allow a mistake like this to pass, but if this was a more professional survey sent out by a stranger I would expect them to put enough care into designing it so that questions don’t have typos.
So, the playful wrath of my friends gave me a lot information about them survey itself, not just what the data I got from the survey. My friends and distant relatives would take the survey because they like me despite an error but I think a stranger would feel much less inclined to do such a favor.
Up next, more on the survey!