Post #5- Primary Research

After analyzing articles for the past couple of months, we have collected a great amount of secondary data. However, how can research be complete without primary data? Hence, why I decided to create a survey to personally collect any data from college students.

Survey information

This survey contained 10 questions. These questions included multiple choice, open-ended, and check all that apply questions. The first part of the survey asked the participants information about their demographic characteristics. These questions were created to find any connections between a particular group and my research topic. The rest of the questions were created based on the main points of my topic. Lastly, this survey had 31 participants in total.

The results of this survey were quite surprising. I did not expect some of these results because they were the opposite of the data I have collected from the past posts. These results also allowed me to find more negative effects of my topic and see it from a different perspective.

Results of Survey

Analyzing this survey was quite interesting because some of the results for a couple of questions were not how I imagined them to be. For instance, there were two questions that surprised me the most. The first question that surprised me was question number four.

In this question, I asked, “Should college tuition be free, lowered, increased or not changed at all? And Why?” The participant’s votes lied heavily on only two choices, “free” and “lowered.” In figure 1 it shows that about 48. 4% of the participants voted for tuition to be lowered and about 48.4% voted for free tuition. This was surprising because I would think that college students would like to stop spending their own money on tuition or school materials. However, I was totally wrong.

After reading responses on why tuition should be lowered and not free, I noticed that most of the participants had similar reasons. For example, some participants commented that “…many already take advantage of the system so more would take advantage….” This response was not shocking, but odd. It was very odd because not all students are aware of the effects of this proposal on other adults besides college students. Another response that was repeated was that “If [tuition] was free then people can just get degrees just like that and it would take away from the accomplishment and have other negative effects.” This response was an eye opener for me because before making this survey I never really thought about how this proposal can also affect a student’s mentality. I only thought of the physical relief it could do to a student’s life.

The last question that surprised me was the seventh question. In this question, I asked, “Do you struggle with paying with your tuition?” The votes of these questions were mixed. In figure 2 it shows that about 29% of the participants voted for “Yes,” 25.8% voted “Sometimes,” and 45.2% voted “No.” These results shocked me for two reasons. The first was because, before the survey, I thought the responses would lie heavily on the choice “Yes.” However, the results ended up being a mixture. After analyzing this question more, it does make sense that the results for this question were a mixture. It makes sense because most of the participants ranked themselves as middle class.

Most adults that are considered from the middle-class society do not struggle with a lot of financial issues. The last reason that shocked me was that the highest percentage was on the choice “No.” This truly shocked me because the results are contrary to one of the main points I have mentioned about this proposal. As a result, this question demonstrated that students are able to pay for their tuition.

In conclusion, this survey gave me eye-opening data that will help me with any of my future papers. Even though some of the results were not how I expected them to be, they are still very useful. Overall, I can say that this survey was successful and made me look at my research topic from a different perspective.