Reflection Paper
Reflection Paper
The assignment three is to design a survey for collect commute data about people who live on campus. This assignment was divided in to four parts; Sample design, instrument design, instrument testing, and coding responses. Our group’s mission is to design the survey instrument which contain enough data and easy to respond. The way our group approach the goal were. First, understand the goal of the survey and predict what could the result. Then, list all variables that we thought could be significant in this data, and design the most effective questions. Finally, we check the effective level of this survey and what relationship we might get from those variables. This great discussion brings me an opportunity to learn more about how make a survey structurally, and how to corporate with other people to finish a project.
When we first start to design this survey, the question we asked was “what is the goal of this survey”. And commonly what variables we can get from this sample that are significant when running regression? We understand the general purpose of this survey is to gather any useful information as much as possible. However, it is hard to find a balance point between great amount of data and easy to reply. So we made out a list with all the important variable we want to ask, and we thought to make this survey as short as possible will be easier for others to take. The first debate we had was about whether we should ask about the distance of travel directly in the survey. My opinion is the distance traveled can find by people’s travel time multiply the velocity of transportation. My teammates opinion is V=S/t equation is not satisfied in real life;the People’s driving speed can be different, and traffic jam is also included in total time travel. After discussion I agreed with their idea, the residual in real life can be significant. And by asking them the distance traveled, we can compare it with the answer from the equation and find the residual by subtraction.
Then, we divided the survey in to three part; general information, commute information, and demographics information. The general information is simply for helping us to link the survey taker’s identity to the record. After that we ask four questions to get their mode of transportation, time of leaving, time they travel, and distance they travel. From what we learned on last week discussion class; the demographic questions should be asking by the end of the survey, so we put them by the end for not alter the answers because of skew. Our group also discussed benefit between let people write their answer, or provide the answer to be multiple choice. We choose to provide the answer to the people, just making it easier for us categorize and coding afterwards. By the end, I made a google form to test the respond time of this survey. The average respond time of this survey is 42 second, which I think can highly increase the possibility for people to finish this survey.
