Week 7: Survey Progress & Categorizing My Data
Hello everyone! Welcome back to my blog! This week, I have been continuing to distribute my survey and preparing for data analysis, so I would like to update you all on my journey.
First off, I now have 34 responses! I got more from my piano teacher’s students and at today’s Tri-M meeting. Turns out, the reminders actually worked! Also, to further expand my sample size, I’ve been reaching out to local high school music teachers around Arizona for help in distributing my survey to their students. My goal is to get all my responses by April 4th, so I can have about 1-2 weeks for data analysis.
Also, I’ve changed my response goals a little. Initially, I wanted at least 50 but ideally 75-100 responses, and I still want to get as many responses as possible. However, I now realize that it is very important for me to get at least 30 responses from school students and 30 from college students. Having 30 from each group will allow me to conduct comparisons with statistical significance. Ideally, I also want both groups to be close in size for more accurate comparisons, but I’ll work with what I can get!
I’ve also made some changes to how I plan to categorize my data. While I am still analyzing all the responses together to find correlations, I am also planning to split the data up to analyze differences between certain groups of students. Originally, I wanted private lesson students to be one of the groups. But many high school and college students also take private lessons. When I realized that, I thought I might be able to have students who solely take private lessons as a group, but I do not think I will get enough responses from standalone private students to make strong comparisons.
So, I’ve decided to divide my data into two main groups: college students and school students (which includes high school and younger students). Originally, I had planned to just focus on high school students, but a few of my piano teacher’s students who took the survey are younger than that. However, they still have lots of musical experience, so I don’t think that will drastically affect my results. I’ve already started sorting the data and will continue to do so as I get more responses.
I know I haven’t been able to share any results yet because distributing my survey is taking way longer than expected, but I am doing my best to speed up the process. I hope to finish soon and am excited to start analyzing the data. Thank you so much for reading, and stay tuned for more updates!
Comments:
All viewpoints are welcome but profane, threatening, disrespectful, or harassing comments will not be tolerated and are subject to moderation up to, and including, full deletion.