In many ways, we live our lives much as though we are being surveyed on a daily basis. We respond to questions and identify different characteristics of our lives that are filtered, analyzed, and eventually used for something, whether it be advertising or a different element that lives beyond us. I think of all the crazy quizzes I've taken online. "What Gilmore Girl's Character am I?", if I was on Twilight, "Which Hunk would I marry?", and so on and so forth. My discussion with my students really opened my eyes as to how people view the world of surveys. So many of my students really disliked Facebook quizzes or even Myspace. They had better things to do they said. Yet, even in the midst of survey crazy culture, my students felt surveys from school had more value and they truly took them more serious. Of course this completely blew my notion that perhaps surveys meant less because of social networking sites.
I feel somewhat inundated by surveys of late because I thought, planned, edited, dreamt, and probably talked in my sleep about surveys for several weeks now. I had to do a lot of soul searching, questioning, and ultimately confessing how my agendas sculpted the questions I asked and the approach I took to analyze data. I very much wanted to prove my point because I felt innately right about what I've observed and experienced. Being in this class has awoken an awareness in me that my research must reflect honesty. Even if every ounce of me believes I'm right, I have to create questions that allow room for being proven wrong. At first this scared me, what if I was proven wrong? What if I couldn't control the outcome? And yet, on further reflection, this process is so freeing. It's a challenge rather than a fear, to test the waters and find some form and taste of truth, and yes I mean truth with a little "t". It opens up possibilities and allows learning to be rich and deep. So, I take a moment and breathe in the freshness of letting assumptions go and embracing what is unknown; it is only in this release that we learn to truly research.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I think your experiences creating the survey instrument were extremely valuable. I found it really helpful to see the iterations you went through along with gathering feedback from experts or others in the field. Overall, I'm pretty skeptical about surveys, but do think they can have some benefit used with other methods.
ReplyDeleteAh, totally contradicted perceptions - happens to me all the time. You are positioning yourself in a lovely way to be open to being wrong. You're right - that is freeing in a research project.
ReplyDeleteIt's impossible to write an agenda-free survey. The best we can do is minimize our bias as much as possible and be open with our participants and ourselves about the bias that remains.