Lara: Saturday, July 24
Thirty down and ten more evaluations to go! The progress we have made on conducting visitor evaluations has been very exciting, considering that we still have a month left in this leg of the project!
So far, the substance of the evaluations has been very enlightening. Participants have ranged considerably in age, sex, and race and the same questions have elicited extremely diverse responses across those we have surveyed.
An interesting observation that came up when I was surveying both on Friday and Saturday was the question of how different individuals responded to the request of being surveyed. I have always found that men who are alone are far more interested in participating in a survey than women who are alone, and men and women respectively with children almost always turn down the opportunity to participate in a survey, from my experience. I engaged in this same conversation separately with Maeve and Isabella, and think that these observations go to the heart of the considerations that must be made when developing a survey methodology that intends to incorporate as representative a sample of participants as possible. How can one overcome the very real problems of a biased sample, and to what extent does the surveyor affect the outcome of survey results?
Obviously these questions cannot be answered in a blog post, but they are worth pondering as the study continues.
So far, the substance of the evaluations has been very enlightening. Participants have ranged considerably in age, sex, and race and the same questions have elicited extremely diverse responses across those we have surveyed.
An interesting observation that came up when I was surveying both on Friday and Saturday was the question of how different individuals responded to the request of being surveyed. I have always found that men who are alone are far more interested in participating in a survey than women who are alone, and men and women respectively with children almost always turn down the opportunity to participate in a survey, from my experience. I engaged in this same conversation separately with Maeve and Isabella, and think that these observations go to the heart of the considerations that must be made when developing a survey methodology that intends to incorporate as representative a sample of participants as possible. How can one overcome the very real problems of a biased sample, and to what extent does the surveyor affect the outcome of survey results?
Obviously these questions cannot be answered in a blog post, but they are worth pondering as the study continues.
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