Week #11

This week I was very much looking forward to moving on to dealing with the qualitative, instead of quantitative research. I find quantitative research quite impersonal even though it is much easier to deal with in terms of complication and interpretation. However, it can be quite difficult dealing with all those numbers and extremely tedious entering them into SPSS thanks to all the little technical idiosyncrasies that arose along the way. Having become more familiar with the program over the past week or so it was interesting to finally be able to formulate some conclusions from the data we have worked so hard to gather and record. Using the analyse tab we were able to create graphs, tables, and discover the mean, median, mode, etc. of our data. This meant we were able to notice some patterns in our research. For example, marketing and finance majors seem more likely to turn to drugs and female students are more likely to turn to shopping or entertainment than male students who seem to prefer socialising. These are only noticeable patterns and we have not formulated solid conclusions yet. Unfortunately I was absent for Thursday's class so I have not seen the results of the interviews that my classmates conducted but I found the results of my interview very interesting and surprising.