CEdO 540 Week 5 - Summary Report and Sources of Data

Our Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings survey uncovered 3 very interesting trends:
- Women preferred Harry Potter 2 to 1, while men preferred Lord of the Rings 2 to 1.
- People below the median age of 34 tend to prefer Harry Potter, while Lord of the Rings fans had a more even age distribution.
- Older readers are more likely to differentiate between aspects of the series, while younger readers tend to like all or nothing from either series.

It is hard to draw any great conclusions from this, but the broad age appeal of the Lord of the Rings means it might have a greater effect on literature in the long run, while Harry Potter will be more of a fad. It would be interesting to repeat this survey every 5-10 years and see if Harry Potter fans retain their preference. The fact that the last Harry Potter movie came out at the same time we are giving this survey may have also affected the results. Lord of the Rings still had a strong showing even though the last movie release was 6 years ago.

Our other assignment was to look for sources of statistical information on the internet. The best site I found was fedstats.gov. This site contains an index to all other federal sites that publish statistics, and has several search tools embedded in it.

CEdO 540 Week 4 - Survey Results and the final report

Our group has come up with a very unique idea for a survey. Most of the idea we came up with at first revolve around the political situation in the state. Given the prevalence of TV commercials around the recall elections this is not surprising. However after talking about it we all wanted to do something less obvious (maybe we were all just tied of the political fighting). In the end we came up with a survey around which is better, Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings. Although this seems like a frivolous topic, it is actually one which might have a big impact in the classroom. These two series have been some of the biggest grossing movies in the past decade. Understanding the preferences of a group might help a teacher to make a class more interesting. It might also give some insight into what people value more, characters or plot, and show some differences by age or gender.

We developed the questions for our survey in the group, making sure to keep them as unbiased as possible. We then created the survey in Google Docs and distributed the link to as many people as possible. We have received a total of 41 responses, and we found some very interesting trends in the data. The next step will be to compile a report that summarizes the findings.