Sunday, January 22, 2006

irksome pushy people.

I don't know if we really had to come to school yesterday. All that was left for us to do was to tally the survey tools we had in hand. The start of the day was normal, we were in our classrooms and almost all of us were in our seats chatting and finishing our survey results. After a few hours, the groups started talking about tallying. Suddenly, the noise that was coming from just chatting turned into loud, almost-high-pitched voices of yelling and bickering over how to tally.

Decision 1: Tallying will start by pair (or by block). Each pair has about 6-20 households to tally, and there are 9 pairs. After all the pairs are done tallying their survey tools, the 9 pairs or 18 people (from the 2nd immersion group) will break into 4 groups (1 group for each page). Each of the 4 groups will add all the frequencies and it's over.

PROS: Results will be more accurate (especially in page 1 where everyone's having trouble with the Estimated Monthly Income and Occupation) since the pair who surveyed a certain household knows the answers better than anybody else.

CONS: It will be time-consuming. When it is time to combine every block's data, each block's frequency for a certain answer will be added to the next and to the next and to the next, making it 180 answers to add (per answer) and approximately 10 answers per table with about 14 tables per group (times 4 groups, 1 group for every page of the survey tool). Plus, if one pair is confused with Estimated Monthly Income or Occupation then it can also be the problem of every pair.

Outcome of primary tallying -- 180 survey tools to combine.

Decision 2: Each pair will finish their survey, answers will be uniformed so that everyone knows what this or that is or where it will fall under. Tallying will start with the 4 groups (as mentioned in decision 1). 9 pairs x 20 survey tools (for the benefit of decision 1) = 180 survey tools. Then, these 180 survey tools will be tallied by approximately 4-5 people then it's over.

PROS: Problems about Occupation and Estimated Monthly Income will be contained on group 1 only (because group 1 is responsible for page 1 where these two are under). If the survey tools are finished with uniformity before tallying, there would be no problem at all. Even if there are 180 survey tools to tally, there are 4-5 people to work on it.

CONS: If, and only if the survey tools aren't finished with uniformity, the group responsibe for say, page 1 will have a hard time figuring out where to put the data. Take note, that situation will only happen if the survey tools are not finished by the pair with uniformity of the answers.

Outcome of primary tallying (or for this case, just tallying) -- 4 sets of final tallied papers (1 set per page or group).

THE VERDICT: I prefer decision 2, clearly. It's easier, more organized and quicker. But some people maybe just don't understand how decision 2 works. Or rather, they are so caught up trying to use their choice of decision 1 that they can't even try to listen to decision 2. So in this case, since some people are so narrow-minded, we did it via decision 1.

We didn't finish it even if we took the whole day, until 4 pm. The only thing we finished was the primary tallying. Talk about time-consuming. It's frustrating how some people can't give just one minute to listen to another person. I get decision 1, the people who wanted decision 2 get that. But the people who want decision 1 keep pressing that it would be more accurate and I reckon it's because they really don't get decision 2.

*sigh* It really irks me how they kept on pressing their point and yelling and butting in when another person's explaining. It was so hard to keep pressing myself for other people to stop speaking or rather, yelling in the middle of somebody else's turn. These people with hard and narrow minds should really think for a moment. They are so unfair. But they are still my friends and classmates, hate to say it but I can't do anything about it now, can I?

*~*

| 10:24 PM | |