So I’ve been in this class, Methods of Social Research, all summer. It’s been an interesting class, if disappointingly slow. There’s all sorts of super-cool stuff that we could have been doing, but the prof is clearly not all that excited to teach us. It’s not that he’s bad, it’s just that he’s slow.
Which is sort of bad since it means that the major project has sort of fallen behind. The point of the class is to generate a serious questionaire to test an array of hypotheses, administer said questionaire, colate results, and then generate an analyzing paper and a work up a presentation for the class.
We have two weeks remaining in the class (three if you count this one). We got the aggregate survey, the one to be administered, today. That leaves us the weekend to get them administered, next week to code and analyze the data and to generate research papers and work up a presentation. And then the week after that to actually give said presentations.
This is only complicated by the fact that we’re going to be coding the data from the surveys independently, then emailing those results to the professor who is going to generate an aggregate data-set and provide us with it.
All this is only further complicated by the fact that the survey we’re using is basically a first-draft. Not really fit for public consumption. The way it was generated was that each member of the class (that’s 17 students) came up with a hypothesis to test, and then generated a questionaire (with an average of about 15 questions). One copy of each questionaire (that’s 17 different ones) was handed to each student at the end of class Tuesday, and each student was required to generate an aggregate survey by noon today (less that 48 hours). I managed to draft mine in about five hours, but I have experience with surveys and am exceedingly smart, so I imagine that the average time spent was much higher.
The problem here is that the survey I did in five hours was rushed. It’s organizationally messy; it needs some serious editing for both content and presentation. I recognize just how sub-optimal it is. Which only makes the fact that the prof picked it as the single best aggregate survey turned in today, and thus the one we’re using to do our project, that much scarier.
Take a look at it if you want. I do find that there’s an interesting spread of topics covered. The number of overlapping topics (and their points of overlap) were very interesting:
- About a third of the hypotheses deal with drug and alcohol use.
- A qurter deal with political positions, with an interesting focus on peer and family pressure.
- Two or three deal with patterns based on how far away students went for college.
- Two deal with the causes and results of altruism in students (this came as a shocker to me).
- Two deal with sports.
- One deals with divorce.
- One deals with the interaction of fandom and religion.
Guess which one mine is.
Ultimately I’m still somewhat excited by the whole thing, but I find that the enthusiasm is at least partially suppressed due to the fact that we’re doing such a crappy job of it. I like doing things well, and this thing? We’re not doing it well at all.
In happier news, I’ve had a lot of people who read this journal interested in my community management project. I’ll see about getting a more detailed explanation out there tomorrow or Saturday so all of you can be as excited as I am.
Thomas