Extracting Data

At the beginning of out politics project we asked people around the college some questions in the form of a questionnaire. 

Here is a link to the original questionnaire.

Everyone in the class asked as many people as they could and then we all typed our individual results into a group table to get a wide range of data to extract information from.

The majority of people access their political information online, shortly followed by a similar amount of people who don't access political information at all. These are results that I would've expected as the age demographic we asked which was people of ages between 16-25, use the internet for as much as they can rather than watching television or physically reading a news paper. The internet is the most convenient, immediate and free way to access information at any time. Also I'm not surprised that many people don't access political information at all as most teenagers probably find politics boring and feel as they wouldn't have an important influence when it comes down to making decisions for the country.

Looking at the amount of people we asked who don't access any political information at all, I am not surprised that over 40 people, which is the majority of the people we asked, don't support a political party at all. There are under 10 people who do support a political party and 1 person who can't decide whether they do or not, however this 'undecided' vote seems to me that the person doesn't support a political party because if they did they would have said yes. Again, I think that the majority of the young people don't support a party as they find it boring accessing political information, therefore they aren't well informed about a specific party to say that they definitely support one.

When looking specifically at the difference between the amount of males and females who support a party I expected there to be more of a contrast. The results are almost exactly the same in fact. I am not sure whether I expected more males or more females to support a political party but I would've expected one gender to be more interested in politics. Perhaps the results would've been different if we asked people from specific courses that we decided. For example I would expect the majority of Sport and Beauty students to not support a party but I would expect many more people on the Business or English course to support a party.

Extracting data from this table was more difficult than I expected it to be. Because the data was recorded by a whole class of people, everyone had their own method of inputing the data. Some difficulties occurred when a question with an answer that should've been a number from 1-5 'How much do you know about politics? (Rate 1-5)' was answered with "a good amount" because of badly recorded data like this, it meant that I couldn't create a able straight from the spreadsheet as it didn't recognise it as reliable data.

If we were to do a group collection of data again, extracting data at the end would be more successful if we decided at the beginning that everyone must input the data in the same way. This way, we would be able to make graphs directly front the spreadsheet which would saved time and make the information more reliable.