Survey Accounts

Process of Finishing Surveys

When I started to collect my surveys I thought I should go to one of the coffee shops near campus so that I could find many Texas Tech students. Finding students was the easiest part. I am so glad that everybody filled out the survey willingly. This is because our survey was about something that everybody had some idea about. All of them seemed interested in our study. So, I could say that I was lucky, because I did not have any problem getting people to fill out my survey.

If I talk about the time, they all give it back in 3-5 minutes. So, I could say that they were focused on the questions. The only problem I realized after I got back the surveys, was that most of them did not fill out the ‘from international, from USA’ part. I believe that they missed out because of the font. I did have to ask them to fill that part.

Overall, I found 5 American males, 5  American females, 1 international female, and 1 international male. I believe I have done very well to complete this process. (KNA)

My Story of Collecting Data

Although I did not have direct access to my friends and colleagues in Texas Tech, I had no problem with data collection. In order to make an online survey to be sent to respondents, I started with checking out Survey Monkey, as I had used it before, and it was a familiar tool. However, it could not be used for this study because of its limitation on the number of questions in the free plan. After a short search, I found that Google has a similar service, called Google Forms, for creating forms of all kinds, including quizzes, surveys, and questionnaires. I transferred the final questions, which were discussed in class, to an online form and sent the link to my friends. The following note was written in the email that I sent them:

Hello friends,

I hope you are all having a wonderful weekend.
Sometime in the middle of your free time (which is probably too much!), once you’re in the mood to help me with a study, please fill out a survey by clicking on the following link. It’s for my ESL 5301, where I practice advanced writing with other international students.
Questions are about using social media by TTU students. So, it’s all about fun stuff! Let me know if you have any problem or question while filling it out.

Thank you so much,

Shabboo

After one hour, a friend of mine, who was the first respondent, texted me and mentioned a problem in one of the questions. I had forgotten to provide the second choice for question number 8, which was NO. Fortunately, his reply to this question was YES and it did not affect his response. Other than that, I did not receive any feedback. I could check out the responses to see how many where completed. When the desired number was reached, I exported the responses directly to Excel sheets. (SV)

The story about collecting the survey

I asked one of my colleagues in my lab to fill out a survey for social media. When he looked at the survey at first sight, he thought the topic of the survey was very interesting. He immediately asked me why I did this survey and I answered him that this was for my English writing class. He commended that the class was very interesting and closely followed the trend of the modern society. After he looked through two-page questions of the survey, he said that there were too many questions. I explained that this survey included all kinds of questions proposed by different classmates in my class. In addition, he mentioned that he met his wife on a social media site. About three years ago, he was in Beijing and his wife was in Shanghai. Beijing and Shanghai are very far away. He had never been to Shanghai and his wife had never been to Beijing. However, one day, he found a girl from Shanghai that followed him on a social media. He looked at the pictures of this girl and immediately felt that his heartbeat sped up. He found that this girl was the one that he was looking for for a long time. Later he and the girl became friends and they discussed everything. They were surprised that they had so many common interests and they could understand each other very easily. After that the girl became his girlfriend and he moved to Shanghai. Two years ago, they married in Shanghai and had a boy. He told this story with a great smile on his face. I could feel that he was very happy. I was so impressed about his story. At the same time, I was astonished about the power of social media. Later, he spent about 3 minutes to fill this survey out. When he gave me the survey, I said thanks to him, not only for his answers, but also his story. When I reviewed his answers, I found he missed some questions. I thought it might be because the characters on the survey were small and then asked him to supplement it. (FL)

Survey collection

I conducted the surveys mostly in my department and people mostly filled them out willingly. I had a total of 14 surveys filled out; 11 of them filled it out on paper; 3 of them filled it out online. I, my wife Tugce and an American male friend from my department filled out the survey online. Overall, people thought our survey was interesting and fun to fill out. The first two people who filled out the survey were my female friends. While we were in our graduate studio, I asked them to fill out our survey if they had 5 minutes and they agreed to fill them out willingly. While they were filling out the survey, one of them told me that she just realized how much she uses Facebook. The other lady asked to get a copy, because she thought our survey is quite interesting ,and she wanted to use our survey as an example for one of her class. After they were done with filling out their surveys, I asked another graduate student to fill out our survey if she had 5 minutes. Since she is a new student and doesn’t know me a lot, she was not sure about filling out the survey and I was completely ok with that. But at that time, the other two ladies told her that they also filled the survey and it was fun; in the end, she was convinced to fill out the survey. One of the male students from my department told me about how much he hates the ice bucket challenge while he was filling out the survey. Another male student, while he was filling out question number, 1 told me that he has both Facebook and Twitter accounts and he is actively using them; on the other hand, although he doesn’t have an account, he visits Vine and YouTube web pages regularly to watch videos. He explained to me that he checked both have an account and post regularly for Facebook and Twitter; he checked "only use occasionally" for Vine and YouTube. Finally, I realized that some of the male students were laughing while they were filling out some of the questions, but I couldn’t figure out why. (SK)

Survey

I started on the survey on Thursday Oct. 16^th.  I worked in Holden Hall building, particularly on the first and second levels. I asked many students around this building. Some students accepted that survey and others rejected cooperation in this survey. I noted females were more cooperative than males, because many males refused to fill out the survey. My strategy in this survey was that I intended to ask students who were free or worked with their phones, because I did want to upset some students who read books or worked with their laptops. My survey included 15 survey papers, 8 American females, 6 American males and me; 7 of them were graduate students and the others were undergraduate students. I did the survey during two days, around one hour for each day.  I noted all of them use social media except one girl; she does not use social media. Each one had different answers from others depending on their method of using them. Finally, this was a nice experience; I benefited from it.     (FA)     

Survey summary

This survey was taken in the geocience department, Texas Tech University on October 21^st, 2014. Five graduate students in remote sensing lab, 10 undergraduate students in spatial analysis lab, three teaching assistants, two faculty members participated in this survey. Everyone was glad to help me do this survey. 

There was something interesting during this survey. One student said he had "killed a few" when taking the ice bucket challenge (question 10) and also described the whole process when he dumped a bucket of ice water onto his head. It was funny and everyone in class laughed loudly. Another boy described his feeling of the ice bucket challenge, that he would rather have had all diseases and autoimmune disorder. One boy said he sometimes checked his Facebook account when he was waiting at a stop sign (question 2). For question 19, one boy said whether to publish his relationship status depended on the site. A few students didn’t care about the “real name” policy of Facebook, so they had such comments as “neutral” for question 7. 

The biggest problem for this survey is that some students just checked their gender but did not select their education level or whether they were American or international. (YL)

Surveys

I was guilty of putting all the demographic information in one line; I thought I was clever to get all the survey into a single piece of paper, but the price was that some people didn't see to check off all the necessary places. I got plenty of surveys, but several were incompletely filled out. One didn't fill out male or female. You never know if they just object to those questions!

I got most of the surveys in the Writing Lab where I work when I'm not teaching. A couple of them were student workers; one of those was an international undergraduate. One woman said "Facebook is the devil!" and told about being forced to tweet in a Literary Criticism class. She hated that assignment and told the teacher so. She also objected to the column "don't know/don't use" because there were several that she knew well, but didn't use. She was one who just crossed out "don't know" because then the answer would be true. To us it didn't matter, if you don't know or don't use it's the same, but to her it was important. In fact I'm interested in documenting the considerable backlash or hostility against social media in certain areas. The survey wasn't really designed to catch it, but I think we caught a little anyway.

One person admitted to texting while driving, but "only at stop signs". I thought that was interesting. There's much more here than this survey could possibly catch. But I think it turned up interesting things. People were all glad to fill it out and were interested in the results, though I generally didn't give them the website. I could do it later, since I work with most of them. (TL)

Data Collection Procedure

To have my surveys filled out, I asked TTU students who were sitting at Starbucks on Glenna Goodacre and University.  I targeted youngsters who looked like they were studying, approached them, and asked them if they were TTU students.  When they confirmed my suspicions, I asked them if they would be okay with taking a survey about social media habits for a class at TTU.  Some accepted readily, some accepted reluctantly, and one seemed very suspicious and demanded more information before she agreed to fill out the survey.  I observed that most people seemed to enjoy the survey because it was interesting to them.  Several of them discussed the questions with other people at their tables.

Most of the participants completed their surveys within 10 minutes, while a couple made a show of nonchalance by setting the survey aside for about 20 minutes, finishing some homework, then filling it out.  In general, they seemed friendlier after filling it out than before, possibly because they realized that I meant them no harm, but actually did just want them to fill out a harmless and anonymous survey.

Collecting surveys

The collecting of surveys was done following the agreement. I collected around 18 surveys, most of them for undergraduate students. The people surveyed were students for biology classes. No people denied to fill out the survey, and most of them were really interested in the study. The first group of surveys had incomplete data, because they didn’t see as separate questions the first line of the survey. In the later groups, I told them to be careful about this issue with the survey.

In general their answers were similar. They thought texting while driving was dangerous, and they rarely or never texted while driving. Also all of the people know about ice bucket challenge, but they have diverse opinions about that. In terms of social media use, people usually have more than one account, but they post more in one or two than the others. In opinions about difference by gender in language use in social media, they also have diverse opinions. (CRB)