Hw 53

Part 2:
Overall, the survey was pretty much what I expected. There weren’t any questions that I found unusually interesting or that caught me off guard. I didn’t really feel embarrassed answering any of them, but that might just be me. I can’t really say that I trust the statistics due to the sample size and the selection bias (everyone who took the survey was a New Yorker interested in taking this class) but it’ll still be interesting to look at the results.

Part 3:
The questions that surprised me the most were the ones about drugs and drinking. Honestly, I was surprised that so few people said that they had been drunk or used drugs; it seems like every time I’m early for advisory someone down the hallway is talking about how smashed they were the night before. It makes sense that of all questions for people to lie on those would be the ones, but it seems to me that most of the kids I know in this class aren’t really the type to lie about this stuff. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t expecting that.

Part 4:
I looked at both of the professional surveys and, given their specific focuses, they didn’t really seem to have much in common with ours. This is probably a function of the fact that they are professional studies; the whole organization is devoted to studying one thing. The only real similarity I found is the suicide question (there is a similar question in the second survey). I think that the professionals made an important distinction that we kind of forgot about: they only asked about the 12 months before the survey. I’m not proud to say that I checked the “No, only once in a while, not much” box, because I had thought about it, once, when I was like seven, when I was overreacting to a lost homework assignment and thought I would never get into middle school. They also added the word ‘seriously’, which I think is important because that would have changed my answer as well.