Overall i enjoyed taking the survey, there were some really good questions in each section and just sitting there for a 15 minutes taking it got me thinking about my family and friends a lot more then i thought it would. A lot of the questions in the friends category not only got me thinking about whether or not its true in my life but also got me to think about other people i know. I began to think of many of the people in my class or grade and thought how they might respond to a question like "You do stupid things and/or things you don't particularly enjoy to fit in" By thinking about what i expect to be the truth i developed what seems to be almost universal truths about how friendships work.
The questions that made me stop and think the most were the ones that dealt with how i think i will live or what my life will be like in the future. These questions forced me to think about the composite of my relationships, in other words i had to not just think about how i act and what my relationships are like in general but also i was forced to ask myself if i think i will always be that way. Is the way we act universal and the same for everyone or do and can we change how we interact and do we try to adjust peoples perception of ourselves? to i answer this question I say that yes people can change slightly but on the whole major relationship and action changes only happen when one switches age groups. To explain, yes while relationships change in general teenagers act the same and have the same relationships until they move to onto adulthood.
Part 3:
One of the comparisons that i found particularly interesting was that the overwhelming plurality of students put 4 (yes usually, a lot) when asked if boys should be the ones who take the initiative in relationships but when asked if they are frustrated with gender double standards 73.1% of responses were at a 3 or higher. So it seems that people do not like the double standards on gender in our culture but at the same time don't care enough to ask for change. The one thing that surprised me was that only one person said they are not at all tired of the people in the school. If everyone really is so sick of the people in school they put on the good show. It's kind of amazing nearly all the people in the school are tired of each other but still hide it to be polite or liked. This response shows the lengths people will go to not to show others how they really feel. Overall i think i had the same responses for most questions as everyone else. However when there were most of them probably took place in the "self, politics, etc." section.
These differences can probably be attributed to the fact that most of these questions are dependent on personal experience. A lot of the questions had to do with ones own life and Questions like "I'll be a good parent" and "this culture sees me as a success" forced me to think about my perspective of my life and that might be why (for me at least) some of these questions were different.
part 4:
When looking at the survey from the department of health i noticed some similarities and differences. One of the differences was that in the department of health survey it was reported that only 8% of sexually active teens use birth control pills. This is different from our results in the question "do you use condoms or other safe sex technology, if we ignore the 37.3% that said N/A the next highest was yes, usually with 29.4%. So by in our survey more people use safe sex than the average city teen. The department of health also reported that almost 50% of city public high school students are sexually active, our survey showed that 32.7% are sexually active. (the 32.7% comes from the number 4, "yes usually, a lot".) So again our results are different from that of the health department. I would be more inclined to look at the results from the health department, not because our results are incorrect but because the health department's research seems to be taken from a much wider scope. I wouldn't generalize our results to the rest of the city so for that reason i think the health departments results are more reliable when looking at the majority of teens.
When i looked at the second survey from the CDC the one thing that stood out the most was the complete mismatch between their survey and ours when looking at drinking. Our survey reported that 40.4% of students have been drunk but the other survey reported that 75% of students having been drunk. obviously a giant gap but that could be attributed to the fact that our survey was not mandatory, and that only a small number of students took the survey. One similarity i noticed between these two survey's was that in the CDC survey 15.8% of students reported doing things to lose or keep from gaining weight, this is similar to our survey where when asked the question "I've experienced an eating disorder" only 9.8% said yes, quite a lot. So here the is a common ground, most students apparently do not have eating disorders.
The differences and shifts between the survey's show that its hard to get an accurate view on what is true about relationships and teenage life. If the process of comparing the results has proven anything it's that one should never generalize what may be true in one survey as true all people. There are too many extenuating circumstances either with the reliability of the responses to the questions or whether or not the results can be assumed to be universally true.
No comments:
Post a Comment