Week 6: Survey Complete!

As I completed my final round of edits on my survey with Mr. Fleming, I felt the question format wasn’t ideal for answering my research question, so we decided to shift towards questions that used the Likert Scale that would allow me to look at the correlation between top answers and relational answers. Google Forms does not have a Likert Scale question format, so I used a scale of 1 to 5 format. 

Mr. Fleming also  suggested adding a question about identification with the “Gen Z label” and participants’ actual birth years. The addition of this question will provide insight into the difference in social media’s effect on members of Gen Z’s conversations, as well as those who may be Gen Z, but were born earlier on in the generation and identify more culturally with millennials. 

I aim to reach over 150 responses to keep individual responses from causing large shifts in the data. I faced this issue last year in AP Research when I was researching the impact of choral training on reading comprehension skills in high schoolers. I had a very small group of participants–roughly 20 in each test group–and when testing the results, I found that if just two students had scored 100% on the test, the entire group’s average went up significantly. This leads to results that aren’t statistically significant. 

As I mentioned in previous weeks, the survey is going out on my own social media, I have asked friends outside of BASIS to spread the survey around to their schools, I have put up a few QR codes in my neighborhood, and will hopefully get the QR codes up at BASIS after APs. I also messaged my brother, a freshman in college, asking him to repost the link to my survey on his social media in order to reach a wider audience. The additional questions and changes I made this week will hopefully improve data collection and get me a clear answer to my research question.