Written by Guest Blogger and 6th Grade Student Elena A.
On the last week of March, the sixth grade started a survey project. Even though it wasn’t a PBL, it was an add-on for one of our math units about statistics and graphs. Dr. Gross, Mr. Gross’s wife, is a former senior research director at GfK - a company who gave us the opportunity to send out a survey they had already invested money in. GfK is a survey company that surveys people from all over the US. The sixth grade was responsible for coming up with two topics to survey people on, then picking four subcategories for each overall topic.
After a whole grade discussion with Dr. Gross, we were able to brainstorm and pick main topics and sub-categories. After writing up all our ideas on the board, we started ruling out the ones that seemed impractical. Dr. Gross came to the decision that our survey itself would be in an entertainment category. The two main ideas we chose were movies and music. Our subcategories for music were frequency of listening, types of music, how you listen to music, and live music performances. Our underlying questions for movies were types of movies, frequency of watching, people you watch movies with, and how you watch movies.
Taking these sub topics, each class split into groups of around three people to make a survey question for each sub topic. After we finished that, Dr. Gross would check them and send them “into the field.” People that are on the survey list who didn’t receive a survey in March were sent one class’s survey questions. The people on the list range from 13 year-olds to 105 year-olds from different ethnic backgrounds.
We were successfully able to send them out, and once we got our survey answers back, all three classes were able to compare their data and come to conclusions about America’s music and movie culture.
Survey Results:
- A total of 1085 respondents completed the survey
- Most people watch action/adventure movies- about 25%
- Most people watched movies with family or romantic partners- about 40%
- Most people watched movies on their home TV- about 80%
- Most people listen to pop or rock music- about 35%
- Most people have been to a live music performance (depends on definition)- about 80%
- The number of Hispanics who responded to the survey was high- 45%
- Mostly women responded to the survey - 70%
- The answers were affected by how the question was written
