For my research proposal I am trying to figure out the
answer to the question how do religious beliefs relate to
people’s view of higher education? My thesis for this is if a person is more
religious in their beliefs, then they will value higher education less. For this,
my main form of data collection is a social survey that I am giving to anyone
who will take it. I really wanted a diversity of students and non-students to
answer the questions. I am lucky because instead of just giving it students on
UWSP campus, I did my survey early enough that I took it home for thanksgiving
and had people back home do it. I’m also going to a conference this upcoming weekend
where I intend to have folks from different UW-System campuses fill it out
there as well.
Some obstacles that I
have faced so far include mainly time. Because I am doing a survey I have
slightly more time because so long as I created my survey early, I was able to
give it to more people. However, this doesn’t help in that I don’t necessarily have
a lot of time to analyze the data that I have collected in a comprehensive way.
The second obstacle that
I have encountered is how too general my question was. When I originally created
my question, I thought that keeping it broader would be beneficial because of
the options it would leave after the research. I found that when creating my survey
though, having it too broad made me want to have a bunch more questions. To
solve this, I made my thesis more succinct, so that I could create questions that
were more specific to the topic I really wanted to learn about and find out if
I was wrong or right.
For other variables that
I wish could be different, I would have to say that other than the obvious time
and money, I would also like to change my topic all together. I think that I
would make it more specific-but still having it deal with education and
religiosity. I would just have a different question like how does religion play
a factor in students remaining in school. Or does religiousness impact one’s
ability to choose a campus that they want to. Something like that, that would
be more specific and to be honest a little more interesting to me.
