agisaak :
Unpaid member on surveymonkey.com where I made the survey.

10 questions are certainly a limitation, however one can work around that with a good questionnaire. If it becomes too long, it will be much harder to compute the results.

The main things I want to know are what people know/think are the right answers to:
1 - estimated teen pregnancies from 05-09 in the US
2 - estimated teen abortions from 05-09 in the US
3 - why teens have sex and become pregnant in the US
4 - Which 3 states have the most teen pregnancies
5 - How teen pregnancy can be prevented
6 - If teen pregnancy is a burden on the US economy
7 - The age and gender of the people answering

I know the facts from my research. I am not using the survey to find out how many teen pregnancies and abortions exist, it is to find out the world's knowledge to show if they do or don't know the facts.

90% of the people on this forum are guys, your stats are going to be horribly inaccurate.

You mix up a lot in your questionnaire, if you just want to test knowledge. I would as well check the source of your facts, if this is based on solid science.

Example: The Q2 and many of its answers confuse pregnancy with sex. This is ideologically laden.

You say you test knowledge, when you actually don't, you test opinions as well in Q3, Q4, Q7 (subjective, socially determined). Not only do you test opinions, when you think you test knowledge, but you have a very limited answer-set, which does in the understanding of some do not reflect the real causes or do not describe the issue correctly.

That is why I send you some papers, so you can think again if your “facts” actually mean anything.

It'll be completely pointless for me to take this survey. US pregnancy stats are so far away from any of my interests that they don't even register on long-range scanners.

BrettR:
How can my stats be wrong because its all guys on here? The stats are suppose to show what people think/know are you implying guys are not people?

Té Rowan:
Yes, it may be completely pointless for you to take it because you gain nothing from it. Whether a person thinks about it or cares at all about the topic their answers will still be valid for my goal.

flooce:
You can say my answers are very limited but that is the facts I found. I am not asking anyone to go and study up to find the answers. Its merely a test to see what the general public's knowledge is on the topic. If someone came around asking "How many people do you think live in the US today? A B C D E F" You only have 6 answers which you can argue is limited. The correct answer is amongst the six and you arent only given 2 choices which would make the results useless because its a 50/50 chance of getting the right answer.
I had questions I am answering in my project and asked the same questions in my survey. In the survey I listed the answers I found in my research. I test opinions or knowledge whats the difference, when saying people think or say this when asked question A? The way people answer is based on their opinion which comes from their knowledge. None of my questions are "whats your favorite ice cream flavor?" Yes that is opinion and not fact. My questions are facts, you can have an opinion or think you know something but its not an opinion based question.

skald89, since you disagree with many of the comments we've made about your survey, why don't you show the survey to your teacher and get their opinion on how it's written?

JamesM:
My teacher knows I made the survey and I have posted it to our class blog like she told me to do.
I hear people's comments and agree that my original survey is severely flawed. I just don't understand how the new one is or how asking my professor's opinion will make a difference on people's opinion on here. I asked the questions and supplied all the answers I found on reliable sources. What else is there to do? I didn't make up answers so I won't be getting answers I want to hear its facts and social misconceptions. I have 18 responses for my new survey and 72 for my original. If I don't get at least 50 responses to the new one I am going to leave the part of "public's knowledge" out of my design.

> My teacher knows I made the survey

Okay but I was suggesting that you ask your teacher's opinion about the way the survey is written.

I'm not trying to give you a hard time about this. Writing a proper survey is hard, especially when dealing with a controversial subject. I agree that you've made some improvements to it.

JamesM:
Sorry, I should have been clearer in responding. She told me to put it up on the blog because its the way we communicate and she also said that the class and her should take the survey.

I appreciate people trying to help me with the quality of the survey. I'm wondering do people know the actual answers or what the sources say, that everyone is saying my answers are limited?
Questions 1, 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 how are they bad survey questions?

I don't know anymore, to be honest I thought the survey was decent. I asked questions and gave the answers reliable sources(no articles and newspapers) supplied.

Thanks everyone for your inputs.

@skald89 - If I understood you correctly, your survey is testing people's knowledge of pre-existing statistics. Well, I know sod all on this subject. Hence, you would gain nothing from my participation.

Te Rowan:
Yes, your pre-existing knowledge.
Whether you do or don't know a thing about the subject you fall under the category of the general public. What I am trying to achieve is finding out what the world thinks/knows. Thinking can be wrong and based on inaccurate information.
This is the basic idea of what I am trying to achieve. The design is just to portray my goal.

I don't know what the actual hypothesis you are trying to investigate is, so some of my comments might be off base, but here are a few things for you to consider.

With respect to questions 2 and 3, I don't really see how people's responses here could possibly be interesting or informative. I can't figure out what type of investigation would actually care whether people know or don't know the specific numeric values which you give; I can see one trying to establish whether people's assessment of the prevalence of teen pregnancy is accurate, and whether their views on this matter correlate with attitudes towards teen pregnancy, but asking a question about raw numbers won't achieve this. Unless you have some way of establishing whether your respondents have a reasonably accurate view of the *size* of the relevant demographic, I don't see how you could possibly interpret their responses. Also, it's somewhat odd that in Q3 the entire range of 100 000–200 000 is omitted from your set of answers.

Also, bear in mind that when you start posting your survey on forums such as this one, you are appealing to an international audience. Most non-Americans have no real reason to know stats on teen pregnancy in the USA (you might perhaps want to reconsider some of Té Rowan's comments in this light -- he's posting from Iceland).

Question 4 and 5, though, are where the real problems lie. In question (4) you ask for reasons why teens have sex, but some of your answers seem to be more appropriate for a question regarding why teens get pregnant. 'Rape' and 'Taught abstinence Only' do not make sense to me as reasons why people have sex, though they might be reasons why they get pregnant. 'Lack of Education' only makes sense as an answer to this question if you are making the implicit assumption that teen sex is somehow bad and that only those who don't know better would do it. I can't help wondering whether you haven't inadvertently conflated two different questions here.

Putting that aside and assuming you really are asking about sex rather than pregnancy, your answer set is simply strange in terms of what it omits. Adults have sex for a wide variety of reasons including, among others, the fact that it is enjoyable, the fact that it can strengthen social bonds, and the simple fact that human beings have biological urges. Yet you omit all of these as possible answers suggesting that teens have sex for entirely different reasons than adults.

Now it's possible that this is the case, and perhaps you do believe this, but if you want to make some claim regarding why teens have sex, you cannot build this assumption into your answer set. The majority of your answers seem to presuppose that teens don't have an inherent desire for sex, but rather have this imposed on them by outside factors. Once again, it is possible that this is the case (or is the case in some instances), but if you limit your answer set to possibilities which make this assumption you are not going to get meaningful results (and of course, even if you did include a wider range of possibilities, establishing why people *think* teens have sex cannot be used to argue for why teens *actually* have sex which is, most likely, fairly heterogeneous anyways).

Question 5 is poorly constructed since it isn't clear whether you are talking about preventing teen pregnancy or preventing *unwanted* teen pregnance -- two entirely different issues. Also, given the weird blend of responses in question 4 which appear to conflate sex and pregnancy, I also find myself with a lingering worry that you are doing the same thing here and contemplating ways of preventing *sex* rather than pregnancy (at least for the answers 2, 3 and 5).

Also, use of contraceptives and abstinence fall into an entirely different category than education through parents, schools, or after-school programs. It's not clear that they really belong in the same answer set.

Moreover, your educational options are overly vague. You give, for example, the possible answer 'parents talking to their kids'. Talking about what? Contraception? Eternal Damnation? These answers really should be made more precise or you will not have any way of determining exactly how your respondents were interpreting these.

Finally, I think you'd get considerably better data if you asked about a more narrowly defined demographic than 'teen' -- after all, this would include middle schoolers, high schoolers, as well as many college freshmen and sophomores. I think you'll find that people's attitudes towards sex are *very* different for these three demographics.

André

To delete a thread contact Tiffany Wardle aka Miss Tiffany and ask her to do it.

http://typophile.com/user/108

Skald89 is this part of an information design project—as John suggested—or design and typography in anyway?

It was going to be added to an info graphic pamphlet. Can it be deleted please?