Today we started our surveying and interviewing! We are trying our best to keep the study reliable and valid! Mark, Stacie and I are all in the same sociology class, however we live in different places and are  interested and involved in different activities throughout campus. This is actually an extremely beneficial attribute to our experiment because we each have our own social network and connections to which we can use to administer and produce the study. In order to keep our study objective and valid, we are trying to reach out to as many different people and 'personalities' as we can! This means people of different organizations, clubs, interests, majors, ethnicities and genders. Understanding and applying the terms Social Capital and Cultural Capital has been extremely useful in achieving this goal! Because of each group member's unique campus involvement, we have Cultural Capital, and because we have the networks to reach out to so many people, we exhibit Social Capital. The more people we survey, the chance for bias in our sample decreases, and therefore our study INCREASES in reliability!

This is a screen shot I took while writing one of the questions
to our online survey, using surveymonkey.com

In order to have reliable and valid results, I wanted to have the largest and most diverse sample size possible. So, I went to facebook. I used www.surveymonkey.com (for free) to create my survey, and then I posted the link to The University of Texas Facebook Wall. Above the link, I had a statement requesting students take the short survey for a sociology project. The participation has been quite successful and it increases by the hour! I used the UT facebook wall because it was a quick, easy way to produce reliable and valid results. I believe this method reached a large population of diverse backgrounds in the most efficient way!