Analyzing Research
As stated in previous blogs, my REC 401 class attended Night\Shift to conduct research! I have participated in research before with my REC 220: Program Management class. We handed out surveys for participants to complete...but I did not need to create the survey or analyze the survey. So doing research for Night\Shift was definately an experience, as I got to be part of picking the research topic, coming up with the survey questions, inviting individuals to participant in the survey, and the best part yet...analyzing the data. I personally thought it would be easier to analyze, however with the types of questions we asked it become a little time consuming (if I did the survey again, I would have definately changed the questions just to make it simple to analyze. First. My partner and I entered each survey individually into excel. The columns identified the different questions and the rows identifed a coding (1 through to 75) which represent a participant who completed the survey. Second. I used the COUNT function to determine the amount of times that answer was selected. This determined the frequency of the answer. Example: Female was selected 48 times (frequency 48), Male was selected 25 times (frequency 25), and Other / Prefer not to say was selected 2 times (frequency 2). Third. I determined which demographic characteristics were most prominent. Fourth. I created pie charts, line graphs, bar graphs, and tables which displayed frequency and percent. Five. I further analyzed the relationships between demographic characterisitcs and art / cultural events, specifically with Night\Shift. Six. A research paper was created to represent findings and conclusions from our study. Although the six steps above (give or take a few minor ones) may seem pretty straight forward. I am not a math/statistic/accounting person, and I took my REC stats course a while ago. I definately had a hard time trying to create/understand t-test and chi test. However, I feel as though I analyzed ad interpreted the data and findings in a realistic yet significant way that will hopefully help Night\Shift organizers! Once the research paper is complete, I will discuss my findings! Next up is preparing for our presentation!