Blog Post 9

For this week's post, I want you to talk to someone new.  Think about what we've learned about the cultural, social and psychological levels of interpersonal relationship development.  Think about what we've talked about from our non-verbal and listening chapters.  Strike up a conversation with someone in the elevator, at work, or behind the deli  counter -- someone you don't normally talk to.  Write up the conversation in 200-250 words.  You'll be graded on form and content as usual.  Enjoy this!  Connecting is the reason we study communication.

Last Thursday I asked my roommate if I could go to work with her again. She works at Beck hall as a desk receptionist and when I go with her I get a lot of work accomplished. The last time I went with her I had established a friendly relationship with the staff. They all knew my name and we shared some inside jokes together. During this study period I happened to have a great conversation with a resident there, her name is Amber. Amber came to the desk to ask my roommate a question about Heart at KU, which caught my attention because I was thinking about joining myself.

Apparently she had seen my roommate at the meeting and wanted to know if she was joining. My roommate told her that she was and said I was thinking about joining as well. Then Amber asked why we decided to join Heart at KU, which led us into a long conversation about life values and morals. It turned out that we had some of the same viewpoints. Somehow Amber and I started talking about next semester and classes. Ironically a class she asked a teacher to put her in was the same class I was taking as well. That led us into another conversation about how excited we were about the class and what we expected to learn from it. During the whole conversation we shared very good feedback. Each one of us gave the other our undivided attention. We were fully engaged in the topic and gave excellent eye contact. We were both understanding and did not force our viewpoints on one another. Each one of us showed positivity, openness, task sharing, and advice. Though we scrutinized some things about ourselves the conversation was very enlightening.

It is funny how you go in with intentions of learning something out of a book and end up learning a lot more about life and people from one small encounter. Life is full of surprises, though it is made up of good and bad experiences, when you least expect it life allows you to see a glimmer of hope.

Blog Post 8

This blogpost should report your group's findings from your survey.  Use whatever statistical descriptions are appropriate for your data.  Assess the quality of your survey's questions.  What did you find?  What can you say about your data and whether it adequately answers your group's research question?  What would you do differently if you had a chance to conduct this study again?

My group and I decided to research on parking at Kutztown University. Since Kutztown has many students and commuters who drive, knowing how effective parking at the university was would be very essential. So my group members and I decided to conduct a survey on students who parked on the Kutztown University campus. We sampled students from random speech classes. Some people did not participate, but from the ones who did we received a lot of different responses.

My group and I came up with several questions for our survey. The first question the survey asked the students to rate how they felt about Kutztown University parking on a scale of one to ten. Some of the answers were in the one to four range and some were in the six to eight range. So the responses we received about how students felt about parking were fifty percent satisfied and fifty percent unsatisfied. The second question the survey asked if the student owned a vehicle, which resulted in about half yes and half no. The third question asked the students if they had a permit to park on the campus. The answers we received were the same as the answers for question number two.

The next question asked where students parked on the Kutztown University campus. Almost half (about forty-six percent) of the people responded by putting nowhere, which led me and my group to believe that they did not own a vehicle but still answered the survey. Most of the other half (about twenty-six percent) parked on the fairgrounds. There was also one point five percent of students who parked at meters, handicap and designated white spaces. That left point four percent of student parking at Golden Bear Village South and another point four percent on the street. Another question asked if any of the students were late due to parking at Kutztown University. These answers were also half no and half yes. The last question wanted to know how many tickets the student received since attending Kutztown University. Most of the responses were none, but for the ones who have had parking tickets received multiple.

If we could conduct this research again I would make sure we used more specific questions. After this survey was conducted I realized that the questions we posed were very board. The second time around the first question asked would be if the student owned a vehicle at Kutztown University. Then there would be instructions to tell the surveyor how to proceed with the rest of the survey. If yes then it would tell the student to go on to question number two and if it was no then it would tell the student thank-you for participating and to hand in the survey to the proctor. Then the second question the survey would ask if the student parked on the Kutztown University campus then that question would be followed by more instructions. This would leave the rest of the questions to students who owned a vehicle and parked on the Kutztown University campus. After the preliminaries the survey would proceed with the rest of the questions.