Monday, November 15, 2010

Analyzing the Survey

This week I decided to go back to survey research and analyze two of my classmates blogs and compare and contrast them to my survey post.  I looked at Jessica Tessier's, who also focused her blog on sports public relations, as well as Alexis Gerleit whose topic is fashion public relations.  I found the two posts took a different approach than I did and it was interesting to see how different people handle the same topic.

Jessica Tessier focused her semester blog around sports public relations like myself, and throughout the semester I have looked at her posts as a comparison to mine.  For survey research, I talked about Sports Illustrated online surveys that are often times reported during games or sports news.  My surveys had fans as the subjects and asked various questions about baseball, the best team, player, stadium, coach, fans etc.  Jess's survey was an ESPN survey that questioned 50 randomly selected NHL players.  I thought this survey was unique because it doesn't seem very common to survey the players. My original thought was that surveys were predominately conducted through fan input.  However, Jess's post proved me wrong and offered an interested perspective into the opinions of athletes.  The survey wanted to get detailed information on the opinions of different cities and players according to various hockey players.  Jess said the survey offered comic relief to ease the participants, but really answered the detailed questions the surveyors were looking for.  Essentially, the survey killed two birds with one stone.  Sneaky.

On the other end of the spectrum, Alexis Gerleit posted about fashion public relations and how surveys are conducted in that field.  She provided a couple of examples from class, ones she found when researching and from Victoria's Secret.  What I really liked about Alexis' post was that she applied her learning from class to real life surveys.  She critiqued one from Victoria's Secret and was able to pick it apart to find the flaws.  She found they used HATE and LOVE in their responses, which, like we learned, should be avoided.  I liked Alexis' approach to that blog because it showed that our classroom knowledge can be easily applied to the outside world.  I also liked it because you realize how many people may not actually know how to conduct surveys.  Before this class I would not have thought anything of having HATE or LOVE as answers to choose from, but now after learning the proper technique, I know it is a major faux pas in survey research.

My favorite part of commenting on classmates blogs is that I get to see how other people handle the same situation.  We all have different topics our blogs are focused around, but each week we post about the same research method.  I love how people can drive their blog in totally opposite directions while still correctly answering the same question.  I have learned a lot from my classmates methods and they have allowed me to think outside the box and approach situations in different ways.

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