We began to try and answer our research question this week by conducting many surveys. The first two days we went out and did in person surveys outside of the Viking Union. Our survey consisted of asking people at what age they first got a phone, what they are majoring in, and then we had them fill out our grammar worksheet, then we would record a data in an excel document. While asking people to take our survey in person we found that many people were on their way someone or claimed they didn’t have the time to take one. We only had eleven people say yes to taking our survey in person on the first day. Since there were so little people who wanted to take the survey in person we decided to put the survey online and post it to our social media pages. Now, we have over fifty-five people who have taken the survey, and collecting information is much easier. We read the answers, grade the paper, and record our data in a organized document. We plan to continue conducting surveys and add in a few interviews.
So far collecting data has gone fairly well but, our data doesn’t seem to be correlating as well as we thought it might. It may be difficult to reach a precise conclusion from the data we have collected. Our hypothesis was that the older a person was when they got a smartphone the better at grammar we thought they would be because they weren’t impacted by the smartphone at such an early age. What we seem to be finding is people do not have very good grammar in general, whether they had a smartphone or not. Most everyone who took the survey made multiple mistakes on our grammar tasks. We have found though that older students tend to focus more on the task. It will be interesting to see as more people take our survey if there becomes a noticeable difference in people who had smartphones at a younger age.
Don’t worry too much about not finding a ‘clear correlation’ with your data. Sometimes research does not answer the question we initially ask or seek, but it does lead us into a new direction. Don’t fully disregard that data. See what underlying causes and things might be happening. It doesn’t mean that you have to restart or do anything new, but you can address these possible new directions in your conclusion.