ESL 5315 Survey Experience

Survey

My experience of gathering the data for the survey included the students present in the Sub during lunchtime. Some of them were in the groups doing gossip and some of them were doing homework alone. In my experience, I had no difficulty at all carrying out the survey. I went to the students and told why I wanted them to fill out the questionnaire for me and how that was going to help in my course. Most of them were willing and few of them said that they were rather busy in their homework. One or two students hesitated in the start but when they saw their friends filling the forms, they ultimately gave in. In addition, a student said that she had already answered the questionnaire two days ago so she would not do that again. I found that students were helpful and friendly and they did not mark the answers just because they had to. They took the survey seriously and all of them even took long to complete the questionnaire as they were thinking deeply about the questions. (Fahad)

Experience when doing the survey

I did this survey in classroom at the end of my TA task. I had to explain to them that this survey had no relation with their performances in the class, because some of them were afraid if they told the truth, that they do play cell phone in the classes, they would lose credit from their final score. After that, most of them were friendly and willing to do me the favor. By the way, most of the students in my class are freshmen, so I think they should in the 18-25 age group. In addition, I asked one of my professor who is older than 50, to help me on this questionnaire; he was glad to do that as well. I am so pleased that it took only a little time to finish all the questionnaires. (Yuan)

Survey

I did the survey on the TTU campus. It was almost dinner time and there were not many students on campus. At first, I went to the Chemical Engineering Department building and gave the survey to some students who were sitting in the hall. They were friendly and willing to fill out the survey. One interesting thing is that when I introduced myself to a student and asked if he was willing to help, he said that he already filled out one earlier that day. In the Chemical Engineering Department building, I didn’t find any girls in the hall. Therefore, I decided to go to the library to finish this task. People were also nice and willing to help in the library hall. Many students were concentrating on their study and I didn’t want to disturb them, so I turned to the Student Union Building (SUB) at last. The only problem was that I found there were much more male students than female ones. Luckily, I got all the questionnaire filled out in the SUB. (Songjing)

My Survey Experience

For the first time at Texas Tech I conducted a survey, and that was on cell phone and intercultural relationships. I did my survey from six American males and six American females who are either studying or working in Texas Tech. As there were some questions which were related to classes and grades, I couldn’t do my survey from any office staff. I tried to choose people from different ages, different majors and who grew up in different environments. I chose one research associate, three graduate students and the rest of them were undergraduates. They willingly participated in the survey. The research associate and the graduate students were from my same department. Some of the undergraduates were my students, some were from my Toastmasters club and the remaining two were random students whom I had never met before. Though in the beginning I was confused about how people would react, I found that everyone in my survey willingly answered all the 32 questions. Two of participant undergraduates were confused about what to say about their major. The research associate was also confused about questions on classes as she is involved only in research. I clarified those questions and they all seemed convinced. Other than that, the survey was really a good experience. (Sheik Tanveer)

Surveys

I had 12 surveys to be done on the topic based on intercultural relationship and cell phones and its impacts. The targets were Americans students or residents of the local community here in Lubbock. I decided to make them easy to do, for survey participants, and entered everything on google forms and created an online survey and a sent a shortened link to my American friends and colleagues. I also went to our university library and handed the surveys to few students in the lobby. Everyone I asked was very polite and accepted my request to share their opinion and time for the survey. I know many American girls who are also my friends, so it was easy to get the female part of the equal distribution of 12 surveys. To get the male part I sent it to over to my married friends and asked them both to do it and went to library for the same. No one said anything unusual apart from the fact that they liked the intercultural questions and thought cellphone questions made it lengthy. Overall it was a pretty interesting experience and I got to get in touch with people I didn’t get to talk to, much, after getting acquainted for the first time. (Snigdha)

Survey

I did take a survey with my department students. My department is a small group; there are about 20 graduate students. With even the small groups I haven't had much time, because I am the only one who is an international student. When I asked them to take the survey, every student was really welcome to visit their office. Some of students I had never talked with, so I brought Korean souvenirs and gave it to them after survey. Those were small dolls made with clay. From this survey they perfectly knew where I was from. At first they were curious why I visited their office by myself. And then they were interested in my survey. I felt that female students were more friendly and had a more active reaction about the survey. And I felt that male students took less time than females. Through this survey I got a good chance to get closer to my department’s students. After getting results I will tell them about it. (Jimin)

Survey

The survey experience was very interesting and new. To be honest, I was wondering about how I would approach people. I decided to go to hand out my survey in Starbucks because I usually go there to study and meet my friends. I went there during the evening after 5:00 PM. I found many students from Texas Tech there. I stayed in Starbucks for more than three hours. I met people who were in a hurry and refused to do the survey, whereas there were people who had the time and were willing to help. I am normally a shy person and approaching people that I do not know was very difficult for me. In addition, the fact that I had to give the survey to six males and six females was somewhat time consuming because I had to wait for either another male or female who is willing to help me with the survey. In general, the people I met were kind and helpful. While filling out the survey, I did have a few people ask me for clarification regarding what is meant by religious purposes and I clarified it for them. I also had people ask me if they could choose more than one option, because all of them applied to them. (Abdullah)

Survey experiences

We, students of ESL 5315, are studying people’s perceptions on two different topics: cell phone usage, and intercultural marriages. We made a questionnaire form to get data from students, faculty, or any professional personnel. Initially, our target was to collect data from six American males and six American females. As a group member, I had to go around the campus and to explain our goal of the study to get the data. I am a member of “Toastmaster Club,” which is a non-profit organization where people can get help to improve their public speaking skill. There are some American male and female members who were happy to do the survey after I told them about our study. Then I managed time to go to the University Recreational Center for the rest of the responders. In both cases, responders were very supportive and cordial to fill out the form. There were two American female students who did not participate in the study because they were so busy. One thing I saw was that responders filled out the first page and gave it to me, because there was no indication to turn it over for the rest of the questions. I had to tell them about the other side of the page. Overall, it was a very nice experience for me to tell a stranger to fill out the questionnaire, after explaining the purpose of our study. (Nazir Hossein)

Social Experience

This is a report about the social experience I had when distributing a survey for my Academic Writing class at Texas Tech University (TTU). As a member of the cellphone group, I decided with another classmate to make an online version for our cellphone surveys. I made one on Monkey Survey website and after writing the whole survey for cellphones and intercultural marriage the website did not provide a link to the survey. It appeared that the website has a limit for the number of the questions that you can send for free. Because the questions were over 10 questions, I have to upgrade my account to be able to get a link. I was annoyed that my time was wasted for nothing, but my classmate found another survey engine and shared the link with me. Our survey was basically a short survey over self-reported cell phone use and intercultural marriage attitudes among TTU students. I got all my surveys in five days, and the number of people was more than I expected. I asked five of my international friends to do it online, and they were polite and helpful. I also asked two classmates from the Applied Linguistics department, who were teachers, to give me a permission to come to their classes and ask their students to take the survey. I was lucky with this step, so I got six international students including myself, eight American males, and eleven American females, a total of twenty-five students. Most of the students had the same comment for question eight, which is a question asking about the purpose of using cellphones in class. They said that they use it as a clock to check time. Some added cultural differences for question twenty-six, which is asking about the difficult aspect for intercultural marriage. All in all, it was easy to get more than an even number of the students and I’m still waiting for 4 other Americans friends to take the survey, too. (Eve)

Survey

I did this survey among my students in chemistry lab, since I forgot to do the survey last week. I was a little bit shy to ask them to do this favor for me, so I didn’t talk a lot about this survey. In addition, those students who took the survey were not very active to this survey. I guess that they had gotten used to taking the survey, so they didn’t show much interest to this survey; or maybe because the survey was performed in class, they didn’t get opportunities to talk with their classmates or with me. (Yu)

Experience on carrying out the survey

It was a great experience for me to conduct the survey on cellphone and inter-cultural marriage. This is the first time in my life to conduct a survey. Since our main target is to study the thinking and visions of American people, I thought it would be easier for me if I would conduct the survey on undergraduate students in my department. I requested several students after a class. The students were very happy to fill out the survey. In a few questions, they were confused and they asked me questions. I suggested they write down their thoughts if they did not agree with the choices and they did so. I was able to conduct the survey on 12 Americans (6 males and 6 females) and 1 international student. Almost everyone answered all the questions of the survey. During the survey, I did not get any negative comments from the people. I think it was a wonderful experience for me. (Hla)

Data collection

In agreement with the sample population that we have chosen for the survey of our writing class, which is 240 domestic Texas Tech students in both genders, each of us needed to collect the responses of 6 males and 6 females to establish our statistical data. Although we had already printed our questionnaire nicely on sheets of paper, we decided to make an online version of these questions, because there were many open-source engines on the internet, such as Survey planet and Survey monkey, that could help us calculate and categorize the answers after they were gathered. In order to get results from a diverse data resource, I came to the Student Union Building, because that is the place where T.T.U. students from different majors and age groups come to study, to take a break between classes or even to have their meals. At first, I wanted to use my tablet to show my targeted subjects the questionnaire, but I changed my mind and gave them the paper version instead. That is because with the question sheets, I could have many people do the survey at the same time, while with the tablet, I could only have people do the survey one by one. During the data collecting process, I found that female students were supportive of the survey while male students were lacking interest in taking time on the questions. However, neither gender showed specific reactions to the survey itself or to any particular question. After one hour and a half, I got more than 12 questionnaire answered, and then I spent one more hour to put all the data in the online version to get the results, which are calculated automatically and categorized nicely in pie charts and briefly written descriptions. (Hoa Vo)

Survey Experience

I tried to gather the data in two ways,: sending email to my American classmates to fill out the survey online, and also asking in person to fill out the paper-based survey. Surprisingly, almost nobody responded online. The probable reason is that asking in person gave me the opportunity to interact through body language in order to persuade them indirectly to fill out the survey. However, there were some people who rejected doing the survey even when asked in person. Most of them gave as an excuse the lack of time when they saw the number of questions. In one case, the guy cursed when I said the survey was about intercultural marriage. Therefore, I decided to go to International Student Fellowship-TTU and ask the American students I know there to do the survey for me. ISF is a place located on Broadway, where both international and American students meet every Friday and socialize while having free food. I could do most of my surveys in this place as people had free time and all were Americans who tended to interact with internationals. There were two people who were surprised with question number 15, and asked me to clarify it for them. 4 people asked me in the middle of the survey, “Then where are intercultural marriage questions?!” and I explained that they will come at the end of the survey. They actually thought that there should be a relationship between cellphone and intercultural marriage in this survey and they were somehow confused. There was one person who was wondering about question 7 as she said, “I don’t know how many hours I spend on the cell phone…” . All in all, Americans in ISF were very friendly and responded to my survey eagerly. (Mahshad)