Geography 300

Scenario:

Suppose the Geography Department here at California State University, Northridge was having trouble attracting majors. The faculty has a lot of ideas about how we might attract more majors, but before the faculty try a bunch of hair-brained schemes to boost enrollment, it is important that the faculty get some data to guide their decisions. A survey of current majors is needed so that an analysis of existing strengths and weaknesses can be identified.

What nobody on the faculty seems to know is how the department is already attracting geography majors? There's well over 100, so they surely have reasons for chosing to major in geography. This is a lot like a business survey. Businesses want to know how customers found their store, so they can guage the effectiveness of any advertising or marketing strategies they have tried.

A geography department can ask similar questions of its current "customers", so faculty can try to enhance their efforts to attract more. Among the questions surely to be asked are :What are the reasons for majoring in geography? Why do students chose geography? Was it a class? Was it a special teacher? Do students parents have an effect? What about high school or community college experiences? When and where was this decision made?

Task:

Your task is to devise a short survey of students. I think any more than ten questions would be way too many. Five questions, plus things like name, gender, year (freshman,etc.) is probably ideal.

Try to think of the things that attracted you to geography and combine your personal experience with what you've learned in Chapter Six, as well as by looking at the Graves Tornado Perception Survey and the Sims and Baumann research. Feel free to use any of the survey strategies that you've learned about, (e.g., likert scales, sentence stem questions, open ended, etc.)

You can use whatever means you have to construct the survey. Most of you will use a word processor like Microsoft Word, but I'm open to other sorts of efforts.

It is important that you also include at least a half page of explanation in which you defend the choices you've made in your survey design. Explain why you asked the questions you asked, defend your choice of survey instrument tools (likert scale, fixed response, etc.)

You should name the project 300_survey_lab_YOUR LAST NAME and send it to me as an attachment or via livetext.

Definitely put whatever you do into your portfolio.