Elizabeth Collins 7th

Survey essay

We were given the task of surveying people about a man running for U.S. senate
and seeing what their reactions to the surveys would be. There were three groups within
the assignment and each group had different surveys that covered the categories of race,
gender, and sexual orientation. There was a constant survey that was the same for each
group and then the second one was either a person of a different race than the original,
the opposite gender, or a person of a different sexual orientation. My group was the
sexual orientation group and as a group we set out to see if the married candidate had
different outcomes than the life partnered candidate, or vice versa.
Of course heading into this project we all had many questions of how the
outcomes would be, or how it would work out. I would say that the questions that
reoccurred the most, at least for me, would have to be who would pick what? Would it be
older people who do not agree with the life partnered candidate more, or younger
generations? Would religion be a factor in it? What about gender? Those are more of the
sub questions that came into question when the basic, who would pick what, question
came up. We discussed the outcomes before we surveyed in a group, answering the
questions with what we thought would happen, but the only real way we could answer the
question(s) would be to go out and survey a mix of people. Now in some areas it is harder
to find people of other religions so that was an issue of answering the questions, but I feel
as though we did a decent job at finding a good mix of people to help us analyze more in
depth what the answers might be to the question(s) we had.

Elizabeth Collins 7th

Survey essay

The hypothesis that my group came up with, based on the questions we had about
these surveys, is that we thought anyone older than 41 would be more opposed to the life
partnered candidate. Because the younger generations seem to be more accepting of
different sexual orientations than older ones. There are some older people who are
accepting but not usually, so that is why we chose that for our hypothesis. This is
politically important because when certain instances like this happen, when there is the
typical candidate running for some sort of government office, then they are running
against someone who is different; sometimes factors of gender, race, or sexual orientation
can play in to people not voting for them. For example, the candidates for Salt Lake
mayor were Ralph Becker, who had been mayor for two terms, and Jackie Biskupski who
is life partnered. I know for a fact that people did not like her just because she was life
partnered and religion plus older ages played into that factor of not liking her. For some
of our surveyors, the sexual orientation of the candidate may have been a problem, and
some it may not have been. I gave the example of the Salt Lake mayor election to show
that the surveys that we gave out have real life and political importance and how certain
aspects of a person can cause dislike, or to like them more.
As a group and personally I believe that our only methodology would have to have
been just getting the surveys done by a certain day. We did not plan any strategies, I did
not plan any, some may have, but as far as I know about my group and myself, there was
no purposeful methods done towards the surveying.
The five questions in the survey were:

Elizabeth Collins 7th

Survey essay

1.
2.
3.
4.

He has a sufficient education to be a U.S. Senator from Utah

He has sufficient work experience to be a U.S. Senator from Utah
He demonstrates strong leadership skills
He has the kind of like experiences that will help him understand

average Utahans
5. I support more of his policy positions than I oppose
Some of these questions are not the best to ask when it is just a brief overview of the
person, because how are you supposed to gauge from the little information given if he has
strong leadership skills? Same thing with the experiences, we do not know all of what he
has experienced or what he learned from those experiences that would benefit Utahans.
Personally, I did not like those questions because they did not seem completely
answerable to the information given. Quite a good number of the answers to those two
questions were either neutral, agree, or disagree, mostly disagree and neutral. I think
either the people being surveyed really did not care or that they felt along the same lines I
did.
My group did not add a question, but thinking about it I would have added a
question not about the person running for senate but for the people being surveyed. I
would have asked them if they support gay rights or not. Because I know that we were
supposed to see if the knowledge of the candidates sexual orientation affected the
answers to the questions, but I think it would have been good to know if they do support
gay rights to help us analyze the answers better because since not all the questions were
the best it is hard to tell if people are answering in the way they did because of the sexual
orientation of the candidate or just because the questions were lame. Sorry, but some

Elizabeth Collins 7th

Survey essay

were, as you already know since it was previously stated by me. Anyway, that is the
question I would have added to help understand the answers people gave to the survey
better.
A result that I gathered from the answers and all the information about the people
giving the answers is that sexual orientation did not really play into the disagreeing with
the candidate. It seems that more of the disagreeing comes from more of a disagreeing of
the candidates stance on things and not him personally. I came up with this result mainly
because one of the surveys that I gave out was to my mother, and my mother does not
support gay rights but I gave her a life partnered survey, I asked her after if the sexual
orientation affected her answers at all, and she told me no. She said she disagreed when
she did because she did not like his stances or she did not think that enough information
was provided to answer the questions. That is where I draw that result from.
Another result I came up with was that females agreed more to the questions being
asked than males. The actual reasoning behind this I am not sure, and the only reasons I
can personally come up with are more stereotypical things, such as, males can be more
politically active than women or that the males were more opinionated. Both of which
may be true for some but not all. I do not wish to generalize so I am not able to provide
reasoning as to why more females agreed than males.
From the results of the surveys we have taken I can say that these surveys need
better questions or more information about the candidate, sexual orientation did not play
a big role in the disagreeing with the candidate, females agreed with the candidate more

Elizabeth Collins 7th

Survey essay

than males, and age groups did not show any outliers or big differences in their answers.
So my groups hypothesis was not correct. But that is typical of a hypothesis. Our/my
original question(s) of who would pick what and why were answered through looking at
the results.
A suggestion or two I could give for future groups? Come up with better questions
to start out with, maybe in more detail than my group and I did, to help get more
thorough answers to the questions asked for this essay. The best suggestion or piece of
advice I can give is to not put this essay off until the last minute. Do not procrastinate it
as I am right now. It will help you to be more successful for this project for sure.