Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
Sweet Home High School students have been crunching the numbers on data they collected in a survey of several hundred people in the Sweet Home area in late October.
Five groups of students in Jason Gorham’s advanced placement government class passed out surveys, a total of 500, throughout the community as part of their class work on polling. They had a list of 20 questions over a wide range of political subjects.
“There’s two things to it,” Gorham said. “I guess probably our main goal is to see how opinion polls are administered, the benefits and the problems.”
Polls are used by the media every day, Gorham said. His students are exploring who uses surveys and how.
“I think the second part of it is to get an idea of what people here in the community think about issues,” Gorham said, along with what different demographic groups think.
“Ours may not be scientific,” he said. “But it’s a pretty decent replication of a scientific poll.”
Students are also learning some of the challenges that pollsters face. For instance, Gorham said, some respondents tell students the answers the survey provides don’t fit their answer.
“You come to realize that polls are designed to bring out certain information,” he said. “The way a question is worded can sometimes force a person to respond one way or another.”
Questions can force people off the fence, he said. “You have to realize there’s a limit to any survey. Some people will always fall outside of the questions. One of the faults of polls: You can’t get a one-page response.”
The poll mixes questions from national polls with similarly designed questions about state issues as well.
Among questions were, “Which of the following best reflects your attitude toward the job President Bush has done thus far?” Answers ranged from strongly approve to strongly disapprove.
The survey asked questions about illegal immigration, the American economy, the importance of religion, gay rights, a national income tax to strengthen the military, abortion, which candidate was chosen for governor and political party affiliation.
The survey also asked respondents to name Oregon’s senators, who is the third in line to the presidency and what the most serious problem facing America is.
Gorham recognized the limitations of this classroom poll.
The students were supposed to compile the information from their surveys and present the information in graphs and charts.
This is the second year Gorham has had his class do this project, he said. Even if all five groups do not complete the task, they should still be able to extrapolate some results. Last year, each group of 100 surveys had similar results across the board.
“One of the things on Monday that I’m looking for is to kind of analyze what they’ve found,” Gorham said. “It’s a way for them to try something new and maybe think about things more than in the past.
“To them right at this point, it’s work. It’s good to see these kids pushing themselves and doing something outside their comfort zone. I like anything that gets kids outside of reading and writing. Rather than just reading the process, they’re becoming the process.”
As they finish, “when they start to create the charts, that’s when they become interested,” Gorham said. That’s when they can make judgments and opinions.
If the results are like last year’s, they will see past the stereotypes about Sweet Home, he said. For one thing, Sweet Home is a little more liberal than it may seem.
Each of five groups had 100 surveys each, senior Nichole Martin said. Her group took about seven hours to break down responses into the three demographic groups.
The whole thing wasn’t too popular with the class, but the results were interesting “once we did it, and once we presented in class,” Martin said.
From the survey, she learned that “young people really have no opinion,” she said. “They like to think they do. If they do, they don’t apply it.”
With all of the government classes students take, she said, a lot of people didn’t know who follows the vice president in succession to the presidency, but that was actually a question missed across the board.
Minorities, about 18 percent of her group’s survey, had a strong opinion on only one or two issues, including the proposed fence along the Mexican border, which minorities tended to oppose.
“Older people were obviously more Republican,” Martin said. “And they were really concerned about Social Security.”
The middle group, ages 19 to 55, was really diverse, she said. They were often split on issues, while younger people were just generally apathetic. They also were confused by some of the questions.
“I was surprised how much young people want to vote because they want to make a difference,” she said. “But they don’t put forth the effort.”
They’re not particularly interested in government unless it affects them, she said.
She was also surprised to find the middle age group split between Republicans and Democrats, she said. She had always thought that age bracket was typically Democrat.
Her mom surprised her too, Martin said. She pegged her for one group, and she ended up belonging to a another group.
Martin said she didn’t like setting out the surveys, but she enjoyed tabulating the results and building a Power Point presentation, she said. “We learned how to gather information from a big group of people. Then we learned how pretty much put it to use.”
It makes it much easier to digest when the information is in a graph form instead of hearing only percentages, she said.
Kelsey Fisher said he surveyed “a bunch of my brother’s friends and Ricky’s (Worley) brother’s friends. It probably skewed the results.
“We found a lot of people that didn’t care to answer it as well as if they were voting,” he said. “We don’t think people like to take surveys too well.
“I figured out that if you could find people that would give you good information, you’ll get accurate results. If not, you won’t get accurate results.
“If you were to get some people who actually really wanted to take the polls, they might answer more accurately.
“Some people were like, I don’t want to answer this,” and his group just left those questions out in those cases.