Week #5

This week we have been putting all of the past weeks' research and reading into practice. The process of creating a survey  for our project has been slightly more complicated than I expected, however my group does seem to have a certain knack for working together and I believe we are making good progress. As our topic, stress, is not something that can be easily counted or quantified we have had to be very careful with formulating questions that will be easy for our research subjects to understand while also being simple enough for us to translate into meaningful statistics. Our original idea was to provide a number of open ended questions searching for individual stories and specific situations. We have since learned that this would result in data that would be very difficult to interpret. While we are willing to make the effort to try and codify this sort of information it would be a shame to go through so much work only to end up with results we could not use or communicate to others. Therefore we have decided to work on more of a scale system, giving our research subjects a chance to note how often they participate in particular activities. I am hopeful this will result in more accurate and less complicated information that will allow us to formulate a solid conclusion. However, as we realize that stress is quite an individual subject we do not wish to generalize the Richmond student body and have decided to conduct more open ended interviews, in addition to the surveys, in which we can gather further, more detailed data that, although harder to codify, will inform our over all purpose and argument.