Course talk:POLI380SEPT2010Cutler/Survey/BCIssues

Benjamin Porteous - I would like to talk know about how British Columbians feel about the new drinking and driving laws as well as the new penalties for speeding.

I would agree that both the new drinking and driving laws and the speeding penalties are definitely hot button issues for British Columbians right now. So we should go forth and set our research question around one, or both of these issues at hand.--RileyHindley 03:32, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Hey guys, what do you think about talking about minimum wage in BC, and if it should be raised? This is kind of a larger Canadian issue maybe but BC does have the lowest minimum wage across the country (correct me pls if I am wrong) and it would be interesting to see what British columbians feel about that. Secondly, what about the olympics and how people perceived the positive/negative affects? Let me know what you guys think. - Nicole Baker

Nicole, I think you two valid points, but for myself I see the minimum wage question as not as important to many BCers right now. Well it probably is as important, but it is not fresh on the peoples mind. Though I do think the Olympics question is a good one. I think we should decide on which one to write on as a research question soon. And if you have any questions you can post for your proposed research questions could you post them because that should help make it easier for this group to decide on what our research question should be--RileyHindley 18:32, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

What about some environmental issues in BC. Run of the River projects and the conflicting issues about harvesting power, but still at the same time trying to protect our salmon industry? There are currently hundreds of licences pending in our legislature for private projects. Is this good or bad etc... (Sam Watson)

The one thing i wanted to add about question 3 that i think needs more revision is that it seems to be to ambiguous. " do you believe more people will be harmed by these new laws/ penalties than benefited? ... 'harmed' can be the guy who has to pay $300 ticket, or he could be 'benefiting' (because he is learning his lesson so to say. I dont know if there is possibly a better solution or question to ask? (Sam Watson)

I too think that my question #3 needs to be revised. In my mind I had what I wanted to say, but as you can see on paper it is not that well put. So if anyone has any suggestions on how to fix it please do. Or maybe we should just get rid of it altogether. And Sam, I think that the environment is a very important issue, and there are also many other issues important to the people of this province, but for me I see the new drinking and driving law and the new speeding penalties, and the Olympics as the issues that more people would have an opinion about. And since this is a research question and we will be doing surveys, we should, in my opinion, go with what more people would most likely have an opinion on. Then again I am not trying to come off as someone trying to force an issue, I just want our group to come up with a solid research question that the majority can agree upon so we can move on to the next parts of this assignment.--RileyHindley 00:16, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to see us focus on one basic theme for our questions. This would likely have two advantages: first, we would only need to ask one set of screening questions, and second, it might help us to establish linkages between questions.

I agree with Riley Hindley that Run of the River power projects seem like a less salient issue to most people than the new drinking and driving laws and speeding . Admittedly, that is purely based on my own experience, and might not hold beyond the circle of people that I talk to (i.e. younger than typical drivers) , but I still feel tentatively confident on this point. I feel like studying the Olympics would not be as satisfying, if only because it is an issue that, while still quite fresh, is increasingly receding from the public consciousness. I also think, from a pragmatic point of view, that with the limited amount of time left on this assignment, it would be somewhat counterproductive to create completely new research questions now, when our time could be used to refine the existing ones.

On the issue of the mininum wage, I feel that it is only really salient for low wage earners, and those who employ them, and that these two groups will have pretty predictable views, given their interests in being paid more (or paying out less). (Kyle Warwick)

A couple other thoughts. In question 2, the word befitting might be a bit unfamiliar to those with lower English levels. I would propose replacing it with "suitable".

On question 3, I think it would be a good idea to decouple the speeding and the drunk driving laws, as they seem like rather different issues, and I feel someone could feel favourably towards one, yet opposed to the other, and thus not be able to answer the question clearly. The Survey Questions reading in the syllabus also raises this as a red flag, so I definitely think caution is in order.

In another class of mine, we are looking at when politicians actually care about the popularity of an issue. One of the main determinants of this is whether or not the issue is likely to have an effect during an election (i.e. how salient is it). To that end, I would to ask if these issues are likely to effect one's voting habits.

Another condition of public opinion actually impacting policy makers is the traceability of a decision to a particular level of government. I suggest we see if people know which level introduced these changes.

Lastly, I'm curious where exactly the controversy both for and against bike lanes lies. Is it around bike lanes in general, only around ones in busy streets, or only against concrete (not paved line) seperated ones? I only phrased this question in terms of controversy, but if we had more questions, we could also ask what conditions make bike lanes useful for those who support them.

Sorry for the long post, hopefully some of this is useful. (Kyle Warwick)

Good ideas guys. So to summarize, should we focus on one topic area? I think consensus so far was to stay away from questions on the Olympics/Run the river/wages? What do you guys think. I think it is a good idea to focus on "road" kind of issues, since we already have the drinking/driving, speeding and bike lane questions raised. I think Kyle raised a good point about making clear separations on speeding and drunk driving laws. We should put those in two questions - it would be interesting nonetheless to see if people have different views on those. Let me know what you guys think about this focus. - Nicole

Agreed lets stop with the other topics and go with drinking and driving laws and the new speeding laws. The new question about bike lanes with concrete barriers and major street doesnt sound right though. what classifies as a major street? downtown isnt everything a major street with all the traffic? ill take out the three questions i put in and see if i can come up with a better question. (Sam Watson)

I think question 2 would have to be split into two questions: Do you think the new speeding law is... and Do you think the new drinking and driving law is... For question 3 I think we need to formulate it better. Something on the lines of Do you feel the economy in BC will be negatively affected by the new drinking and driving law? Something like that... Finally, I think because of the limit of questions we have that as someone suggested the questions of "are you an eligible driver?" and "do you drive a car?" are irrelevant maybe to our topic. Let me know your thoughts - Nicole

Correct Nicole, that is why if you look on the question page i said (take out?)

As for bike lanes, I'm wondering if we should include a question so specific about downtown Vancouver because survey participants could be from outside the city, what do you guys think? Maybe we could have a question that would measure the tolerance for environmental laws? - Andrew

I think that a specific downtown question would be interesting because of people who have to commute to downtown by car from further away (ie. more than 10km) might have different views than those coming from closer who would possibly consider commuting to work via car or public transit or walking. -Ben Porteous

I agree and I would like to be able to include the question as well, but I just think that the questions should be applicable to all survey participants, whether they live on Vancouver island or in the interior, not just in the GVRD. - Andrew

I also think that since this is a topic about BC issues, that the bike lane question would be more of a GVRD question, thus excluding most of BC. So i think we should focus on the drinking and driving laws and the speeding laws and choose/edit the questions that we already have posted to be our 5 questions. I like number 7 but i think it might not be a great question because it means that the people we ak would have to have enough info on who put the new laws in place, and if they do not know who did then they would not really have a solid response for that question.--RileyHindley 04:38, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

I think we should decide on the topics our five questions will cover and work from there. I propose that we break it down as follows: - 2 questions on driving laws - 1 question on minimum wage - 1 question on olympic satisfaction or dissatisfaction - 1 other question on a province-wide topic (cost of post-secondary education? school closures?)

Andrew

I think we should come up with one research question and five survey questions rather than multpile research questions. I believe our main topics for a research question are 1 - drinking and drivng and the speeding law, 2 - olympics, and 3 - minimum wage. In my opinion(let me know if i am wrong) these three are the best to ask survey questions on to BCers. The bike lane is only an issue in the GVRD.--RileyHindley 05:40, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Agreed, I think as well if we want to have a well-reached survey the bike issue is not on the top of the list. I really like the minimum wage questions. If we do go with those questions, we should maybe allow an element to inform those we are not aware of the minimum wage to inform them of it, so that they have the opportunity to still participate in the follow up questions. Riley, are you suggesting we pick one of those topics and only focus on that one (so either drinking driving/speeding, olympics, or minimum wage?) I believe out of the three of those olympics would be the least appealing. And I also believe that since we only have 5 questions, a focus would be more appealing then a range of questions across various subjects. A focus will give us better results on opinions of british columbians. I think it would be best to either focus on drinking, driving and speeding laws OR minimum wage. - Nicole

Yes Nicole I am suggesting we pick only one of the three topics so that we get the best results. And I agree that the Olympic question is not the most appealing to people, and I would rather we do the minimum wage question because it seems like it has the most potential.--RileyHindley 18:34, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

How about 3 questions on the driving laws and 2 on minimum wage? - Andrew

I like the idea of focusing on those two Andrew. So far we have 5 questions on minimum wage and 5 on driving laws. We should work on fixing up the questions on those 2 topics and then pick perhaps the ones we want to use, either a combination of both topics or just one of those topics. - Nicole

I agree that the bike lane questions will have to be cut, simply to narrow down to 5 questions. I also like the idea of focusing on one research question, as that allows answers to link together, and it allows us to ask screeing questions (i.e. to evaluate how knowledge of the situation effects one's views on it.

I would be in favour of picking all 5 questions from the topic of minimum wage. This seems likely to be more salient amongst UBC students, as almost all of us have worked low paying jobs in the last few years, but many of us almost never drive.

I'm going to make 3 modest changes to the minimum wage questions,if no one raises any objections by the morning. I'm first going to correct the spelling of manner from "manor". Second, I'm going to rephrase the effect on the economy question to allow for a wider differentiation of answers (if only asking about a positive effect, there is no way to distinguish between people who think it will have a negative effect, and those who think it will be neutral).

Last, I'm going to change the wording of the question about the under 500 hours/training wage. I don't think it needs to specifiy that it is only for people who already support an increased minimum wage.

Let me know if I should hold off on any of these proposed changes. - Kyle Warwick

If it comes down to minimum wage and/or drunk driving, I support going all in on minimum wage. Salience is important and a lot of the people in our sample are going to be university students with low-paying jobs. Plus, not everybody has a car. I don't think the drunk driving issue is going to be as salient, or as interesting. Additionally, I like the idea of 'the fewer the better' in terms of subject areas covered in the survey.

I'm in favour of the changes; the wording for the 500 hours question could be clearer (and the spelling modification is definitely necessary). - Douglas Wong

Seeing as our topic is BC Issues (with an "s") I think it's fine if we cover two topic areas. Also, I think that the new driving laws are the biggest story in BC right now along with the HST. Since there is already an HST topic in the survey, I think we should include a couple of driving law questions. Also, I don't think we should be designing our study to cater to UBC students, but rather to the province as a whole. If we can come up with 5 very strong questions on minimum wage I'm satisfied but I think the driving issue is quite relevant and we should address it. - Andrew

I am fine with just doing five questions on the minimum wage. I agree that there are other issues in BC, but with the limited amount of questions we should, in my opinion, focus on one topic and since we have solid questions for minimum wage and others agree with doing it for our topic we should just rewrite/clean up our five questions on minimum wage.--RileyHindley 18:56, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Andrew. This section is BC Issue(s) so we should focus on different areas as well. In the guidelines it also says to think of one or two questions yourself. So if there are 10 people in this group.. then we should have about 20 questions. I wouldn't be too concerned about one choosing 5 now. sam

I've gone ahead and made the changes that I mentioned earlier, that people seemed to generally be in support of.

To the best of my understanding (and I could be wrong about this), although we were supposed to each come up with about 2 questions in the process of this exercise, we also encouraged to narrow them down to 5 before the end of assignment 1. If not, it isn't the end of the world, but it just means Cutler will have to choose 5 anyways, and we might end up with an awkward mix as a result. Kyle Warwick

I agree with Riley's last post entirely. Personally, I would rather have a focused survey than a divided survey, even if we get a wider picture of BC. Also, the minimum wage issue has been salient for years so more people are going to know about it. - Douglas Wong

I've made two minor changes to the questions. In the first instance where we ask about the two wages (regular minimum, and training), I insert what the wage is. I think that this makes it unneceasary to list it on question 3, as was previously suggested. - Kyle Warwick

I like the idea of sticking with one topic. For the 5 we have on minimum wage, if we are to use them, we also have to look at ordering the questions. I think it would make more sense to move question 3 (are you aware..?) to question 1, to get their first initial reaction. In regards to question 4, we could also make it a simpler yes/no question - Do you feel an increase in the minimum wage would have a positive effect on the economy? 1-Yes 2 - No But both work. Finally, in regards to the last question (Should the minimum wage for workers who have less than 500 hours of work experience(the training wage) be raised from $6.00 per hour? 1 - Yes 2 - No 9 - Unsure)- i dont think that is our strongest question. What do you think about asking a question about, "have you heard of any alternative solutions addressing the minimum wage rate in BC?" It would be interesting to see their replies. Just a thought. - Nicole

Nicole brings up a good point about the 500 hours question (that it's not the strongest of questions). That said, there isn't really an alternative. The question that Nicole brought up isn't much stronger than the 500 hours one. As far as I know, there aren't any moderately large alternative proposals by anybody to modify the minimum wage so it may ultimately lead to a lot of "Don't know/did not answer" type responses. Overall, I think we should stick with the 500 hours question.

I agree with the ordering though: having question 3 (awareness) after question 2 (fairness) seems a bit odd, but having question 3 BEFORE question 2 may influence the answer choice for question 2. - Douglas Wong

I'm not sure whether the deadline is firm, we could probably still whittle down our questions, although I think we have a good mix to choose from. He will probably address it in class tomorrow, but i think we should make it clear which topics we want to include so he doesn't take questions on 3 or 4 different issues....Andrew