• Project 7
• Week 2

• Define the goals of your data gathering session.
  The goal of our study is to gather information on how people of age group 50+ form their opinions on political topics, i.e., how many and which sources are used. Additionally, we attempt to find out whether they consider their own opinion biased or balanced. We want to also know how they life in social media looks like and their daily usage of news.

• Based on your goal, derive the kind of people you want to gather data from.
  We needed people of age 50+ for our interviews. Survey, however, was sent to wider range of people to get bigger picture on the problem. Through this survey we were also looking for participants over 50 years old.

• Decide on your data gathering method.
  We use two methods. First, we conduct a questionnaire targeted at the general public, which we will post on forums and mailing lists. In parallel, partially based on preliminary results from the questionnaire we conduct in-depth interviews with multiple participants of our target group of age 50+.
  
  Our interviews are semi-structured. We decided, since we are going to talk about politics, we need to give our interviewed a space for longer responses and to share their opinion on the problem.

• Decide how you handle the topics pilot study & data recording.
  For data recording we used: Audio recording and notes for personal interviews and video recording for a remote interview. Achieved transcription from the interviews will be used as a main source for us.
  
  We use Google Forms as questionnaire software. They will provide us with categorized and counted solutions in the form of Excel sheet. We will be working from there on the next assignments.

Reflection:

We took our time to rethink thouroughly the questions for participants of our survey and interview. There was a lot of brain storming to decide what data do we want to gather from the public. Working together on the file was very helpful and time saving.

What surprised us, was the response for our survey. We got more replies than we expected and we hope that this is going to make our work more clear in next assignments. Our topic is definitely a wide area and a controversive one. We hope for more questions to answer and more solutions to provide.

In terms of how the interviews went, we are happy how did it go and with data we were able to gather. Some information and ideas came up during them, that we didn’t predict before. The biggest struggle was avoiding leading questions, as the main topic is politics and media, where each person can have it’s own, original opinion.

Also thanks to the survey we conducted, we could get a feedback from our responses about the questions and the problem. Opened questions in the survery, allowed our responders to state their opinion and some of them we followed up by the discussion on our meeting.