Questionnaire - Negative Responses Regarding New Advisory System

In Class

Currently studying Social Sciences as an Area of Knowledge in class, our class was divided into four groups of which we were assigned one topic and one type of response that we were supposed to acquire. My group had to conduct a survey regarding the new advisory system and we had to come up with questions that would receive negative responses. The following are the five questions and their results:

1 Do you think class meetings/advisories are necessary? 3 Yes and 7 No
2 Does it bother you that class meetings/advisories are taking away your lunch time? 7 Yes 3 No
3 Do you think having class officers is useful? 7 Yes 3 No
4 Do you really listen to your advisory teachers during advisory? 4 Yes 6 No
5 Would you agree that last year's break time was longer and more useful? 3 Yes 7 No
6 Would you like to extend your current break time? 9 Yes 1 No

We acquired the results that we wanted in questions 1, 2, 4, and 6. Question 2 is like an illusion because other than Monday, our lunches are actually 55 minutes long - almost 1 hour! Our subjects felt as if their lunches were cut short because of class meetings or advisories, but last year we had tutorial/advisory everyday in the morning so in reality our lunches are much longer this year. Although we received satisfactory results in question 4, we also recognized that our subjects have the incentive to lie because they want to look good to the people who are reading their answers. This is called as the observer's effect. As a result, our results might not have been very accurate.

On the other hand, we didn't achieve the results that we wanted in questions 3 and 5. We later realized that some of our subjects had the obligation to choose "yes" in question 3 because they themselves are either part of student council or a class officer. Hence, of course they chose "yes" instead of "no". For question 5, it was our poor wording that made our results steered in the wrong direction.

Overall, I personally think that my group's survey was fairer than other groups' surveys because we didn't limit our options to only either positive or negative responses. Our subjects had full liberty to choose what they really wanted to answer, unless they had other reasons to lie on the survey. As a result, I learnt that surveys can be misleading due to the use of language. Hence, when reading results of surveys or statistics, we should always be aware that what we see may not always be the truth.