SURVEY RESULTS AND ANALYZATION

The Survey distributed through SurveyMonkey was successful, with a total of 78 students participating! All of the students answered each of the questions as well! I created a bar graph for each question which shows the results of the poll. The number above each bar pertains to how many students chose that item. It is important to note that some of these numbers will add up to be over 78 responses. This is because for ALL of the questions, students were able to choose more than one answer (however, their pick for each answer was only counted or cast once). Next to each bar graph is a pie chart, allowing the audience to analyze and breakdown the results themselves. The pie charts allow us to see percentages of student responses, and therefore a broader picture of the results from our survey.

The results of the survey show that a majority of students get their news from facebook and twitter. 1% of students said that they did not care for the news, and therefore we can assume they do not have a source for it either. It is interesting to note that 25% of students receive their news from online and print newspapers. The sociological imagination makes one wonder what makes someone choose one of these mediums over the other? Is a particular news medium more accesible than another? Do people prefer to 'listen' to the news, or to 'read' the news themselves? One could even explore further by separating the groupings of facebook/twitter and online/print newspapers. This would be particularly interesting considering they are the two most popular categories for how college students get their news. After administering the question, I started to actually question the ethics of this actual 'question'. By administering the survey on facebook, was I actually allowing for an experimental bias in favor of those who receive their news from facebook/twitter? I immediately brought up this ethical problem in the survey to my colleagues. After analyzing the question, we agreed there was indeed a bias implemented on the experiment by administering it through facebook. HOWEVER, we continued to keep the question in the survey BECAUSE we still agreed that facebook was the most efficient way to administer the survey. I define 'efficient' in terms that it was the fastest and easiest way to reach a large, diverse and willing population!

Our second question on the survey was questioning how often college students check the news. 33% of students said that they checked more than once a day. A sociologist using his/her sociological imagination would ask if #2's outcome has any particular link to the first question. Who seeks the news more than once a day? those who check through facebook/twitter AND/OR those who get their news from the other categories like newspapers, magazines, etc. For example, personally I receive news from all of the mediums in the first question HOWEVER, I seek news from facebook/twitter far MORE OFTEN than I do from magazines and television. A sociologist would probably want to break down the categories even further to see if there is correlation or variation among 'how often people seek the news' and 'through what particular medium they seek the news through'. 

Our third question asked 'Why do you seek the news?' As with the first question, the response COUNT  is extremely high for this question. Once again, this is because students had the ability to choose more than one reason (or choice/answer). Overall, we see that a majority of students check the news to be personally informed. The second most popular percentage was for entertainment. Entertainment could be even further broken down into categories like sports, celebrities, movie reviews, etc. The sociological imagination pushes us to ask more questions and divide these categories into smaller ones, so that we can understand exactly what students are mostly interested in. We kept the answer choices broad because we were administering the survey to such a diverse crowd, therefore a population with many different interests. The potential categories and questions to be analyzed would be endless, unless a sociologist were to survey a particular group of people like the baseball team, or a sorority. Overall, the pie graph tells us that students seek news for personal information, for school and for other various reasons. It also is evidence for the fact that students need 'news' to interact with their peers and to participate in school. This fact makes the sociological imagination wonder if 'news' is a type of capital culture itself. Does having knowledge of news, or being informed increase or correlate with a person's social status and class? 

Our fourth and final question was 'When do you seek the news?'. Like questions one and three, question four had a large 'multiple response' tally. This is probably because students seek the news under different circumstances, for different reasons and in different locations. Nevertheless, the graph shows that a majority of students seek the news at their own convenience. Sociologists could use this information to conclude that the general college student body is well informed just because they want to be. However, Sociologists can also conclude that the rate of 'news seeking' can be influenced by a variety of things including what is going on in the world and the personal interest of a subject. #4 can be analyzed with question #1, to see if people use a certain medium of news for a certain time that they are seeking it. For example, when I am bored, I usually have my phone and therefore have access to twitter/facebook. However, when I seek news during coverage of the olympics (which is a personal preference), I usually do so on the television. Once again, the sociological imagination pushes one to wonder how, why and when people seek news, and how those motivations influence and vary with each other.