Data, Methods, and Ethics

Survey

I created a survey on Surveymonkey.com of ten questions and created an event on Facebook in order to ensure that I would get people to answer my survey.  The survey consists of ten questions.  

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ZWDP3ZZ


In order to respect time constraints that might make people less likely to participate, I limited the survey to 10 questions. I mixed in multiple choice and open-ended questions in order to get a variety of responses and information for my research.  

I controlled for age by starting the age bracket at 18 years old. This allowed me to target college age students because they are most likely to use texting.

Regarding ethics, in using this age range, I excluded minors and therefore did not need to get parental consent for those who are underage.  I also respected the participants anonymity by not mentioning names and not quoting them directly.  

I administered the survey up on Facebook for one week from May 9th to May 16th. During this time, 93 people took the survey.  I periodically checked the number of survey respondents in order to ensure that the survey was open and functioning at all times. 


Population Overview
Gender:

• My sample is a convenient non-representative sample as I posted my survey on Facebook and 87% of responses were submitted by females, while 13% of responses came from males.  This shows that I have an non-representative sample of mostly females. This question was optional to respondents, one person skipped this question.  

Age:

I wanted to explore whether this current generation is using texting, phone, and f2f communication differently than older individuals.  As you can see most of the respondents fell between the ages of 18 and 22.  This question was optional as well, and one person skipped this question also.