HW 53- Survey Analysis

Part 1:

Done

Part 2:

Taking the survey made me feel very good about myself and my home life. For a lot of the early questions I was able to answer in the more positive columns, which made me realize that even with various aspects of my life at difficult points, I still had developed healthy enough relationships with my parents and had grown to accept them well enough that I could be completely open with them and them with me and still feel comfortable. This held true with my friends as well, since I've had the same close friends for the majority of my life and they are the people I trust the most in my life. However with certain categories, such as the partnering questions, I took a second to stop and think not about the questions and my answers, but rather what this meant about me. Was I behind the curve? Ahead of it? It put me in a position where I stopped and thought about what these answers meant about me and if those answers made me happy. This was section made me question myself more than others because of what it reflected, but I was still happy and pleased that I was able to honestly provide the answers that I did because it showed that I had done right by my standards of living.

Part 3:

In terms of patterns, I noticed that for the last section, self, people tended to pick the "safe answers". By this I mean that on questions that were supposed to be deep and explore the inner sections of the minds, people went with the answer that society most commonly dictates. For instance, 45 out of 52 people said that they do not make others feel bad to make themselves feel good, when in fact I know this to be untrue, because I have witnessed it myself as people are unnecessarily rude and disrespectful of others for no reason and then they smile and/or look happy about themselves. While not necessarily a conscious decision at all times, it is something that people do sometimes without realizing it. However, since the safe answer is no, they say no, because they don't think about the times they have done so. This is societal pressure at it's strongest, where they don't answer truly honestly but don't even realize it, because society has conditioned them to think as society has told them, which is that it's wrong to take pleasure in other people's woes.

Part 4:

Using the first article as a comparison, our school is perfectly in line with the city average for having sex in high school, with 50% of our grade answering in the more affirmative categories on sexual encounters. However, in contrast to this, under 50% use protection of some sort, and 19 people requested not to answer at all. While this could be in reference to not having sexual experiences, even if every single on of those votes went to the 14 kids who said they had no sexual encounters, there would still be leftover vote that said they didn't wish to answer, which could mean they don't use protection and are too ashamed to admit so. Using the second article as a comparison, our school also fell mostly in line with the averages. However, our school seemed to be below the curve in eating disorders. This can most likely be attributed to New York, while not perfect, being one of the healthier and more active cities in America. The way this study was conducted differentiated from ours though, as people had to write their answers out on paper, and it was scanned. This may have caused certain differences to arise based on subconscious concerns over somebody recognizing their hand-writing or something similar.