Week 8 - Analyzing Current Primary Data

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog!

This week, I’m excited to share some updates on the data I’ve gathered so far from my survey. To maximize responses, I distributed the survey to family and friends, as well as on social media platforms like Reddit. To my surprise, I’ve already received a fairly large and diverse sample of 50 participants (and counting!). Most responses came from across the Bay Area, with a strong concentration in San Jose—which actually aligns well with my recent decision to focus the project specifically on San Jose rather than the entire Bay Area

I was also glad to see demographic diversity, with respondents representing a range of ethnic backgrounds including White Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and more. Interestingly, 52% of participants so far fall within the 45–54 age range. To balance out the data, I’m currently working on reaching younger audiences to further diversify my sample.

Now for the exciting part—what people had to say about the police department! Overall, I was surprised by some of the results. While participants generally rated their personal sense of safety in the community quite high, their perceptions of police effectiveness and fairness were much more lukewarm. Many respondents were fairly accurate in estimating how police allocate their time across different activities, but there was a significant underestimation of how much time is spent on administrative tasks.

I don’t want to spoil all the findings just yet, as I’ll be saving the full breakdown for my final presentation. But I hope this gave you a sneak peek into the results of my project. In the coming weeks, I plan to collect more responses and dive deeper into the analysis.

Thanks for reading this week’s blog!

Until next week,
Ashwit