 Student Organizer
Activity One- Quantitative Group
Poll Topic: Although the Internet brings people together
via chatrooms, e-mail, etc., it ultimately isolates people from
one another because they talk less face-to-face and over the phone.
Quantitative Group
Members of the quantitative group, record the response of one member
of the quantitative group to the poll topic using the following
scale.
| 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
| Strongly Agree |
Agree Somewhat |
Don’t Agree or Disagree |
Disagree Somewhat |
Strongly Disagree |
Analyzing by averaging
Note: In order to average your findings, add up all of your responses
and then divide by the number of responses. So, if you had three different
responses of 2, 3, and 1, then you would use the following formula:
Analyzing by tallying
Or, you can create a graph that shows how many students chose strongly
agree, how many chose agree somewhat, don’t agree, or disagree,
etc. It could look like this:
| Rating |
Strongly Agree |
Agree Somewhat |
Don’t Agree or Disagree |
Disagree Somewhat |
Strongly Disagree |
| # of students who picked this rating |
3 |
5 |
2 |
2 |
8 |
In the above example, a total of 20 students answered (3+5+2+2+8).
So:
- 8 students agreed, either somewhat or strongly,
- 2 had no opinion,
- and 10 disagreed either strongly or somewhat.
You could simply summarize these findings by saying that more
people disagreed than agreed.
Or:
- 3/20 strongly agreed,
- 5/20 agreed somewhat
- 2/20 didn’t agree or disagree,
- 2/20 disagreed somewhat,
- and 8/20 strongly disagreed.
If you convert these numbers into percentages, you could say that
15% strongly agreed, 25% agreed somewhat, 10% didn’t agree or disagree,
10% disagreed somewhat, and 40% strongly disagreed.
Tip: to check your math, make sure that your percentages add up
to 100%.
Note: to convert fractions to percentages, divide the numerator (top
number) by the denominator (bottom number) and then move the decimal
point over two places to the right.
When you are finished with your calculations, answer the following
questions as a group:
- What question did you set out to answer?
- Do you feel you gained enough information to answer the question?
- Summarize your findings in one sentence.
- How did you analyze your findings? How long did it take you?
Did you find that it was easy or difficult to analyze the data?
Why?
- In this study, you learned what peoples’ opinions were.
Did you also learn why they felt the way they did? If so, how?
If not, why not? Did the responses you received raise any new
questions you would like to find answers to? If so, what were
they?
- If you were to do this poll over again, how would you improve
your analysis?
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