PHILLY:New In The City

7/13/2012: Mechanical Turk Survey

Today we had our Friday meeting. I took a short break from my searching for non-literal phrases and reading through all the sentences collected. I turned to help our other group members work on our other project. We finally were far enough into the research stage to do a survey for the what leads are more entertaining and along with that what qualities do these leads have that make them entertaining or more well written.  I worked on writing a little introduction to the survey. The introduction needed to help them explain what we were asking of them but no to skew them too much with our views.  I had to do some reading through the leads to try and find some leads that all five of us had the same reaction too.

We had been collecting a list a questions we wanted to ask, or consider asking them, and I complied them together along with the intro. We had about 20 questions but knowing that we have to create a survey that people will actually take we know we will have to get it down to about 10 questions.  These questions about the each lead but we also want to ask some preliminary questions. For instance it is important to know whether or no they are interested in the genre of article leads we were asking them about. Because we took so long arguing about the frame of the questions and which questions we should ask we only finalized the set up/intro questions at this meeting. 

For the setup we ending up asking them 8 questions:

1. Which gender do you identify with?

2.  Age

3. Highest level of education you have completed?

4.  Is English your native language?

5. How often you read the newspaper?

6. How often do you eat fiction?

7. Do you wish you read fiction more?

8. On a scale of 1 to 5 indicate your interest in the following sections of the newspaper? Business, Science, Sports, and International Politics.