Interesting outcomes regarding digital and printed media

Hello all!

I’d like to share a few points about the data that my partner Derek and I have collected over the past few days through our survey about digital and printed media. To begin, there have been a few stand out datum that we thought were a little groovy and worth sharing; and afterward, we’d like to give a status update on how our progress is coming along with the research, and some possible changes to our strategies in collecting it.

Part 1: a field narrative

As the crow flies, we’ve gotten a little bit less data than we initially anticipated. Although, this doesn’t mean that our results have not been interesting; it does mean that it’s hard to extrapolate them much further than the number of people who have taken it so far. We do have a somewhat mixed age demographic, with there being ages ranging from 17 to 82 (61.5% being 18); the genders are about even; and the ethnicity outlook is a vast majority Caucasian/White.

When asked about whether those surveyed were Visual or Auditory learners, 100% have said that they learned better visually. This datum could reflect that many people have coursework or are majoring in a field which mostly deals with visual presentation rather than auditory or kinetic, since some types of content really lend themselves to one style, such as geography and visual; or music and auditory.

Another interesting piece of data was in the pros and cons section of the survey. Notwithstanding to the fact that many individuals gave pros to digital books which allow one to draw the conclusion that digital books are very practical and applicable in many situations, most of those surveyed–when asked on a scale of one (lowest) to five (highest) for levels of enjoyment between print, audio-books, and eBooks–relayed that print books are much more enjoyable than audio-books and eBooks, with eBooks being the least enjoyable of the triad. I believe this is mostly due to nostalgia created by physical books, since the ages surveyed as it stands now are still old enough to where audio-books and eBooks were not as prevalent or popular in youth. With this deduction, I believe more research can be conducted with a selection of people who are younger, to see if anything regarding their attitudes toward digital media has already changed, or if it may change when they come to be the age of those surveyed in our research. I know that as we are progressing forward in time, many young people are getting digital technologies at a much earlier age, which can be the source of the majority of their reading, opposing print. Has the point in time where the majority of youth are now getting most of their reading from digital media? What else will this change? I believe one can ask many interesting questions here, and that’s the main reason we decided to do this research.

Part 2: a personal update

In regards to how our research is going, I mentioned earlier that we have a lower sample size than we had originally anticipated to have by now. It is important to keep in mind that we have the resources to change the frequency of our posts to different areas online, which would result in a surge of our sample size. We also have yet to conduct any in person surveys, which we will need to do in the next few days in order to meet our deadlines. I think we would face less stress and better results the earlier we conduct our research, so that we have more time to look at and think about the data which we’ve collected; but I believe that we still have enough time to sufficiently satisfy the goals and deadlines which we’ve set for the research, as long as nothing more goes wrong.