Biological
Warfare
Chat
Disasters
Drugs & Alcohol
Illegal Distribution
Internet Crime
Love & Sex
New Technology
Suicide
Terrorism
Violence in Sports
Methodology
There were three different ways which we used to find people to answer our surveys. The first way in which we found people was to search the epals web-site data base of school profiles for school interested in participating in surveys or questionnaires with other schools. The second way that we found participants for our survey was to post our profile on the epals web-site, and hope that other people would contact us in the same way that we contacted other schools. The last way that we added to our growing list to participants was by compiling a list, within our classroom. The list was of e-mail addresses of people from around the world that people in our class have already exchanged e-mail with.
To distribute our surveys we used e-mail. Once we were satisfied with the number of schools we had interested in helping us out with our project we created a master list which we used to send out the e-mails. We experienced some technical problems with the distribution of the surveys through e-mail, to remedy this situation we created "update lists" to re-send the surveys to the people who did not receive them the first time.
The eleven surveys were done by eleven groups of three members each. These groups were chosen by the students listing their top three options for which survey topic they would like to do best. These numbers were then put into a data base and our instructor formed groups based on our preference information.
To handle the immense amounts of e-mail we were receiving because of this project students in our classes had to come up with a way to handle it all. Many people opted to create a new folder solely for the survey responses, some students even went further and use the label option in our Eudora e-mail programs to "colour code" the survey responses by schools.
Because of the sensitive nature of some of the surveys that we were conducting, not all of the schools that we contacted answered all of our surveys. To handle this situation we sent copies of the surveys to the teachers from the different schools first for them to review. If they didn't want their students participating in some of the surveys then we respected that decision and removed them for the master list. Some teachers decided that it would be okay for their students to only answer particular questions from the surveys.
Upon entering the information in to our data bases we were faced with an other critical decision. What we were supposed to do with the surveys that did not answer all the questions or had missing information. The first step was to send e-mails, within the classroom, to people requesting anyone who knew any of the missing information for one group to share it with the people who needed it. If this failed to provide us with all of the missing information then the next step was to e-mail the person directly asking them to fill out the surveys again and complete it this time. An other problem that we encountered when looking at the responses was the answers themselves, more specifically, the amount of truth in their answers. For the surveys that were missing information, even after people were contacted then those responses to the surveys were merely omitted from the database to prevent any complications in data analysis.