Winter 2009
Design and administer a
questionnaire to a group of people ("participants"). The questionnaire should collect data
on characteristics of the participants and aspects of their interaction with
computers. Analyse the data and
write a report outlining the topic and related work (Introduction), the
methodology (Method) and the results (Results and Discussion).
Participants are drawn
(ideally, at random) from a population.
You may use the York University community as the population or some
other population conveniently available to you, such as people at a local
shopping mall or subway station or in the neighborhood where you live.
The population can be
narrowed as appropriate. For
example, if you are only interested in Apple Mac users, mobile phone
users, or people over the age of 50, you can screen candidate participants and
use only those from the desired population. Use at least 25 participants. Hopefully, you can keep participant involvement to 5-10
minutes, but this depends on the data collected.
Will you ask participants
to complete the questionnaire themselves or will you interact with them and
complete the questionnaire together?
In the latter case, you are more likely to get complete and accurate
information since participants can ask for clarification on questions they do
not fully understand.
So, what sort of data are
you to collect? A questionnaire
usually begins by asking simple demographic information such as age and
gender. You can also get more
specific information, as relevant to the topic, such as first-language spoken,
number of hours per day using a computer, hours per day playing video games,
preferred browser (IE vs. Firefox), preferred computer type (Mac
vs PC), preferred texting method (multitap vs. T9), number of
text messages sent per day, estimated typing speed, and so on. Can you see possibilities for
interesting relationships or ways to summarize, group, and graph the data?
Try to venture beyond the
examples above. Remember, this is
your assignment, not mine! Can you
think of other relationships? Do
Faculty of Arts students vs. Faculty of Science students differ in…? Does age
or gender make a difference in…?
Do left-handed people prefer…?
Is the number of text messages sent per day related to…? Are mobile
phone users more likely to…? Which
pointing device do users of notebook computers prefer? Do Mac users really dress like
that guy in the TV ad? Are
Starbucks devotees more likely to use an iPod than clients at Tim
Hortons?
Sounds like fun,
right? Sure, but relationships you
find or seek to find need a plausible explanation. For example, I doubt people who wear glasses send more
or less text messages than people who don't wear glasses, but I could be
wrong. If you want to look for
such a relationship, that's fine, but make sure you have a plausible reason
(and include it in your report).
If, in the end, you don't find the relationship sought, that's fine too.
But, an explanation is necessary.
Think about the way
information is gathered in the questionnaire. Do not ask participants their name. Instead, each is given a code (P1, P2,
P3, …). Simple nominal-scale, or categorical, data are gathered as follows:
What is your
gender? ____ male ____ female
If you are interested in
knowing how many hours per day participants use a computer, the questionnaire
could include
Please indicate
your computer usage:
___ 0-2
hours/day ___
2-5 hours/day
___ 5+ hours/day
Gathered in this manner,
the responses are tabulated as counts, or number of respondents, per
category. These data are useful to
show categorical relationships, such as computer usage (low, medium, high) vs.
gender (male, female).
You could also solicit the
same information as follows:
How many hours
per day do you use a computer? __________
Responses framed in this
manner are examples of ratio-scale data.
Provided you have a second ratio-scale characteristic, such as age, you
can show the degree of correlation (r) between the two variables. You can even build a prediction
equation where one variable is predicted from the other.
You can also use a 5-point
Likert scale with a preamble such as "Please indicate your level of
agreement to the following statements". An example statement is
There
should be a law prohibiting the use of mobile phones while driving.
1 2 3 4 5
strongly mildly neutral mildly strongly
disagree disagree agree agree
Are males or females more likely to
agree with this statement? I'm not
sure, but this assignment provides a vehicle to find out. (Pun intended.)
In the Introduction, discuss related
work in the literature. Google
Scholar is a good tool to find related work. Include citations to at least two papers in the literature
(not authored by your professor).
The papers you cite must appear the end of your report in a section
called References. Format
citations and references, as per the examples in the template file (see below).
For the report, please use
this template. Save the template on your computer and rename it a1.doc. Read the
template for information on sections, sub-sections, formatting, etc. The final formatted report should be 3-4
pages.
Submission. Two files must be submitted. Submit your report and questionnaire in Prism using the
commands
submit 4441 a1 a1.pdf
submit 4441 a1 questionnaire.pdf
Please
include your original files, as well:
submit 4441 a1 a1.doc
submit 4441 a1 questionnaire.doc
Please
retain your completed questionnaires for future reference, if necessary.
Good luck.