Course talk:POLI380SEPT2010Cutler/Survey/PublicPolicy

Hi everyone, just started us off with a question about the potential creation of a UBC - Broadway skytrain line which seems like an easy place to start for a UBC survey involving public transportation. This primarily references the proposal at (http://www.ubcskytrain.co.cc/) but doesn't necessarily require the participants to have knowledge of it.

Hi. Thanks for starting the discussion! I was thinking that your topic suggestion might be a little small and there might be more information and public interest if we do the policy on Health Care or Education. UBC transit captures students' interest but not as much those who live in Vancouver and surrounding cities. What if we do our survey on Health care and that way there will be more people affected which will lead to more public awareness? Here is a link to the Ministry of Health's website: http://www.gov.bc.ca/health/ (Allison)

Hi everyone! i agree that health care is going to have a higher level of relevancy for more Canadians. I suggested a question that could start us off. This way we can gauge the validity of the responders views on health care. (Lisa)

Hi guys, I'm just going to add a second follow up question on healthcare. - Catherine

I think those two questions look great. I think they are good ones that the vast majority of British Columbians will be able to answer. I'm going to add a third question. (Allison)

Hi Catherine, I just edited the scale of your question, I thought maybe it would be a good idea to follow what our prof was saying in class the other day about binary numbering. Having the values of 0 and 1 makes the data a little more workable. (Lisa)

Hi everyone! I just added some questions about education, specifically wanting to know people's opinion about their views on having less teachers and encouraging more online/distance-education courses. The reason for this is because more and more courses are being offered in this manner, and there has been discussion about whether or not it would be more cost-effective in replacing teachers with just one in charge running a large "virtual" classroom. (Melissa)

Hi - I was wondering if perhaps we should ask at least one opinion-based health care question? It's a controversial topic, and people have pretty strong opinions about it. It doesn't have to be as generic as "are you happy with the health care system". (Stephanie)

Hey guys, all the questions look interesting, but should we perhaps narrow our survey down into one broad theme or category? Our survey probably wouldn't be too coherent if we asked a bit about transportation, a bit about healthcare, and a bit about education. Personally, I think education is applicable to we as students and to the population in general. I think it would be interesting as well to gather information from non-citizens (which includes myself) about Canada's current education system. What do you think? --DeannaOhlfs 17:02, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi guys, I agree with Deanna's idea that we should have a broad theme or a general category, which will make our survey coherent. However, I'm wandering if "Public Policy towards UBC students" could be our theme. So that we could include your questions such as, "UBC Skytrain", "Health care", and "online/distance-education courses". This way we could make our survey much easier and more applicable. Also, I'm going to add a question to this broad theme. (Yi Han)

Hey guys, I think Yi Han and Deanna have a point. A general theme of how public policy effects UBC students seems fairly concise. UBC Skytrain for transportation sounds good and maybe there could be question regarding health insurance in terms of UBC's AMS insurance? (Amandeep)

I added a couple questions regarding student health insurance, in terms of UBC coverage. Maybe we should work on weeding the questions down, I was thinking with 1 question per category. Ie. 1 health question, 1 education etc. (Amandeep)

Hi guys, I just added another question, "the Tuition fee decrease". However, I'm not sure how big the scope of our focus is going to be. As for now, I just kept my questions on the level of B.C. post-secondary schools. If you guys all agree that we could probably focus just on UBC, I'll change the wording of my questions right away. (Yi Han)

I am concerned that having one survey that covers all three of these Policies will not be focused enough. Keep in mind we only haev 5 questions so it would be better to focus the survey on one type of Public Policy. There are a lot of questions on health care and I think Stephanie made a good point in adding one based on a personal opinion. These three policies are all so different that if we tried to incorporate them all I don't think we would have enough information to really find a trend. I say we pick one and go from there. Health care is a topic that affects everyone in BC and it would be interesting to see some insights into their positions on various government iniatives. Keep in mind when we measure this topic we need to talk to people off campus, so and may run into those who are not from the area and because of these policies being made by the provincial government they are all different across the country. If you feel really strongly about doing Education or Transportation, then that's fine, but I think we need to pick a single policy and get started and there just seems to be a lot of questions about health care already to work from. (Allison)

I strongly agree with Allison, as I said before. Though asking questions about public policy and how they relate to UBC is interesting, we would be limited to only asking our survey questions to UBC students. It looks like the group as a whole as an interest primarily in either healthcare or education. We should narrow this down to either one or the other, not both, because as Allison said, we only have 5 question. Why don't we all pick a preference (education or healthcare) and the one with the most votes we'll work on. I vote for healthcare. (Deanna)

I think that's a good idea, we can't continue with an ongoing debate about healthcare or education. We should pick one and focus on it. That way our results will be more specific. (Alex)

I definitely agree with Allison and Deanna, I think that if our survey covers public policy in general, we won't learn much of anything because we only have 5 questions. I also think that health care is the best option, the only thing I would add is that it might be interesting to look beyond UBC students. I feel that most students at UBC are in a similar situation regarding the health insurance options available to them, as well as health issues that concern them (obviously there are exceptions but I'm thinking on average). Maybe it would be interesting to take samples from UBC as well as other parts in Vancouver or Canada and that way our answers would have a larger variance. (if people are worried about not knowing, or being able to poll people who aren't UBC students maybe we could assign certain people to only ask non-students and certain people to only ask UBS students). (Lisa)

Alright so after hearing back from Lisa and Deanna why don't be put it to a vote between the Health Care policy and Education Policy. Keep in mind we want one that we can get conprehensive data on from people not just attending UBC so it is important to consider everyone's interests. Write your name beside the Policy initiative you want by tonight so we can narrow down the questions and get to work on those. (Allison)

Health Care: Allison, Lisa, Jessica, Deanna, Stephanie, Niaz, Amandeep, Alex

Education

Hey Everyone, I just read through the questions and the comments. It would be easier to work on one or two topics within public policy but is that what we're supposed to be doing? Or are we supposed to include the topics that were listed on the other page? It would make sense since we're only going to submit 5 questions. If we can do one or two topics, I vote for health care as it includes more people into the survey pool, rather than education because that would be singling out just students, especially those who attend UBC with questions such as the AMS/GSS health care plan. With health care we would end up with a wider spectrum of results. Plus health care isn't really much of a preference as it deals with (as exaggerating as it sounds) life or death. (jessica)

I'm on for healthcare too, so I added my name to the above list :) Since it seems like we are all more or less on the same page on the same topic, would anyone mind if we eliminated the questions on the front page concerning other topics? EDIT: I've actually done a wiki before in another class so I'm going to create a section titled old questions and a section titled current questions--DeannaOhlfs 00:34, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Okay, so now that our page is more organized, I added some demographic questions to get more comprehensive results. Furthermore, I've added the value 99 to some of the questions we have so far to indicate "not applicable" as an answer, and the value 88 to indicate "unknown" as an answer. Also, concerning the question about "how well you know your plan" I think we should do it on a scale. Let me know if you guys are okay with the modifications I have made.--DeannaOhlfs 00:34, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

We definitely have to consider these questions in the context of the larger survey and entire 1,000-person sample. Cutler expects us to ask a wide variety of people, not all of whom are at UBC, in Vancouver, or even in BC. Also, it would be really useful to know if other groups are already asking demographic questions, as we don't want to ask "what is your gender?" five times in one survey. (As an aside, does anyone know if we're actually supposed to come up with demographic questions ourselves, or if Cutler will automatically include them as control variables?) Perhaps we could designate one person to monitor the other topic pages to see what kinds of demographic questions they're asking? And once we agree on a public policy area, we should think about the kinds of questions we want to ask. Do we want to measure behaviours? attitudes? demographics? My personal preference would be to ask at least one behavioural and at least one attitudinal question. (Stephanie)

Hi everyone, I definitely think we need to narrow down our focus as many of you have mentioned as well, We need to base our questions on just one topic in order to be able to conclude something from the data and the observations of our data in the end since we are only asking five questions. Our discussion has come down to a choice between education and healthcare. I would rather focus on the topic of Healthcare as well. This way we wouldnt have to limit the category of people we would survey to only UBC students or students in general, and we would also disregard the level of education of the people we would survey and therefore be able to focus on more specific questions regarding attitudes and behaviors that would apply to a larger sector of the Canadian society. I think as soon as we have everyone onboard on basing questions on the same topic we would be able to get down to evaluating our five questions and our answers. After reading the current questions section, I think questions # 1, 4 and 5 are great. I think question 3b might be a bit too specific and not a reflection of the canadian society as a whole, and therefore may not be too relevant with the other data we would gather from the other questions. Regarding the demographic questions, I do think the data gathered here would be influential but these questions would play a role in any survey with any topic and may not result in a relation or varriation that we are looking to observe from the specific five questions we are allowed to come up with. (Niaz)

Hi everyone,

I think focusing on healthcare is a good idea and it seems like almost everyone agrees on it. Looking through the discussion so far, I think we need to keep in mind that the survey is not just for UBC students and we should be able to ask the questions to the general population. Looking at the questions so far, I think they are good start but don't really get at people's opinions or attitudes towards Canadian healthcare. For example, I'd like a question about what Canadians agree as reasonable for healthcare to pay for. Should we maybe discuss what about healthcare we would like to measure? (Melany)

I'm on board for a health care specific survey and have added my name to the list way above. It seems like we are all unanimous about health care being the theme of our survey, so shall we just eliminate the unrelated questions? Also, since there should be an overall feel for the survey, should we just stick to it being about Canadians and their opinions towards health care ie how satisfied they are, how familiar they are with their insurance plans etc or do we want something more broad. (Amandeep)

I'm also confused about demographic questions, as Stephanie said. Has Cutler added them or are we? Stephanie also made a good point about having a behavioral and an attitude based question. A general question though: are our surveys going to be distributed BC-wide or Canada-wide? The reason I ask is because we might run into a problem if we ask BC-health related questions to a wider audience. However, if we were to distribute our survey to BC residents only, we would come to more comprehensive,conclusive results. I'll leave the below blank and we can put down ideas on what types of attitude questions or what not we would like to ask. --DeannaOhlfs 05:34, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Attitude question:

Behavioral question:

I'm just going to list a bunch of healthcare topics, building on what has already been suggested by Melany. This is just to get the discussion started, and certainly is not an exhaustive list: National pharmacare coverage, public vs. private care, user fees, quality of care, Insite (even non-British Columbians would have opinions on this), wait times, rationing of care, rising healthcare costs, frequency of use of the healthcare system, unnecessary treatments, alternative medicine, end-of-life care, electronic health records (e.g., privacy concerns), physician shortages, preventive medicine (e.g., cancer screening), organ donation, genetic testing, stem cell research, immunizations/vaccines, blood donation by gay men, euthanasia/assisted suicide, patient empowerment, and recruitment of foreign healthcare professionals. Feel free to eliminate, promote, or add topics.(Stephanie)

I don't think we need to add the demographic questions since we only have space for 5 questions and he did say if we had more than 5 questions he would just pick 5. So, technically we could leave them and he could just bypass them himself. In response to whether the surveys are distributed BC-wide or Canada-wide, since Canadian health care is both a federal and provincial/territorial issue, it could be both. Maybe we could do one question broadly based on overall federally provided health care and the rest more specific to the delivery of the health care system at a provincial level. Deanna, could you clarify what you mean by attitude versus behavioural questions? For attitude I would assume you mean questions like attitude towards wait times, but what would behavioural questions look like? (Amandeep)

Hey Everyone, Great job on the editing Deanna! It looks much more organized now. :) I don't think Prof. Cutler mentioned whether it was Canada-wide or B.C.-wide though in my logic I think it would BC wide since it might be a bit costly to call long distance if we're doing a phone interview. But I do agree with Amandeep that it could be both, but the sample size will vary more. I'm looking at the list Stephanie has posted and there are many topics to choose from. I personally would like to explore Insite, healthcare costs, euthanasia/assisted suicide and organ donation. (I would choose more, but that would be too much too handle) In terms of the types of questions I agree we should include on behavioural question and one attitudinal question. But that's going to be a challenge because you don't want to sound too direct but at the same time not too vague. (Jessica)

Regarding who will be interviewed, we need to keep in mind that each of the 150 students in the class will determine who they're going to interview, and they may choose to interview people outside of BC. You can put long-distance numbers on your 'fave 5' list, so it's entirely possible that students would phone out-of-province - especially if they're originally from out-of-province. The point is, we can't make assumptions about who people will or won't ask, because we in this 14-person group have no control over who they ask. For that reason, I think it would be safest to choose questions that are broad enough for people from any province to answer. Perhaps it's worth asking Cutler if he will be putting any geographic restrictions on the survey sample? That way we have a better idea of who our sample population is, and can adjust questions accordingly. (Stephanie)

• • • I just looked at Lecture Notes from Week 2 and on the last page, Cutler says under "suggestions for topics:remember we're talking about BC respondents." So that should end the debate, we should focus on questions for BC respondents.*** (Amandeep)

Thanks for clarifying, Amandeep! So BC respondents it is then. Also, an "attitude" question would be something like "do you feel like the dollar amount you pay for in healthcare reflects the quality of service you receive" or something like that, while a behavioral question would be something more like "how often do you utilize your CareCard" or something like that. Somebody please correct me if I am wrong. I am also interested in healthcare costs, and I think organ donation would also be interesting.--DeannaOhlfs 17:09, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree that health care is a broad enough topic that would make it easier to ask a variety of BC respondents, which is why I took out one of the questions that specifically applies to UBC healthcare coverage because it should be more generalized. If we're asking about a specific plan of healthcare coverage to any BC resident, most of them won't be covered under UBC's plan. (Melissa)

Thank-you for finding that Amandeep! I've added two more questions to the pool of questions. Feel free to edit them. They aren't very well worded but I was aiming for something to do with staying fit. I think there's already a program in place to encourage children to engage in recreational sports and their parents can submit the costs when they go and do their income tax (correct me if I'm wrong). The question was aiming to ask if there should be a sort of "universal" thing to do, not just for kids, like an initiative to further improve the health of British Columbians. What do you all think? JessicaSanchez 12:13, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

The questions are really great. Some better than others. We need to pick five though so I think everyone should vote on the ones they prefer. No point in continuously adding more. I like the 1st question in particular. (Alex)

Great questions so far everyone, and I personally don't mind focusing completely on health care. Looking over the questions, is there any reason we can't combine questions 1 and 3, making it one question about the extent of their coverage beyond the basic government one? As well, I think a single attitudinal question is good (since we're limited to 5 questions), but it would be fine to have more if we are looking at other aspects of health policy (for example, the question on health funding for sports). (Tyler)

I just looked over questions 1 and 3 and you're right Tyler, they are similar. I think we should keep question 1 and eliminate 3 because personally, I think question 1 sounds better.JessicaSanchez 15:01, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for digging that up, Amandeep. That makes it a lot easier to choose questions! On a different note, if we're going to ask people about healthcare costs, we have to keep in mind that people have no idea how much they actually pay for healthcare (since the government-provided component of healthcare is funded through taxes, federal transfer payments, etc). In that light, it might be interesting to ask people how much they *think* government-provided healthcare costs. Or we could ask how much they pay out-of-pocket for healthcare. Looking at the "prescription drug coverage" question, that would probably require a screening question to determine whether the interviewee is actually on any prescription medications. Second, BC's drug coverage is determined along a sliding scale based on need, so what we'd actually be measuring is which income group they fall into. (Stephanie)

I've removed question 3 as Jessica suggested (it's down under old questions now so we can keep track of what has been removed). I still feel as though question 1 can be refined some more so that it better measures how people have extened health care. Perhaps providing the options? For example code (1) as through an employer, (2) as through school, (3) as through private company, etc. I'm not sure if we need question 2 either as it isn't really measuring anything related to the questions we are interested in unless we want to measure if people's perscription prices are too high. Question 4-5 are the same, unless we want to measure knowledge of their healthcare plan or their satisfaction with the province's health care plan, they should be deleted. Questions 6-9 are starting to get into measurements of healthcare that are more related to measuring things for the survey. I like the idea of seeing if people would be willing for healthcare to cover sport funding. I may add a question about if people are interested in paying for extravagant surgeries, like a 4th knee replacement, though I'm still thinking about how to phrase it.(Melany)

Looking at question 2, it seems a bit out of place because it's very specific about extra costs of filling out prescriptions, yet there are other areas that the basic healthcare coverage doesn't extend to as well. So I'm wondering if we should reword it and place it after question 3 or take it out? MelissaLi 01:39, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

No problem guys. I agree that question 1 should be edited to provide choices, if it is more detailed, the results will be more meaningful. Also, I think question 2 does seem a bit awkward, simply because the question restricts itself to individuals who take prescription drugs. Unless it can be edited to seem more widely applicable, it may be a bit of a waste of a question just because many interviewees will just pick N/A. (Amandeep)

Hey all, I added another question (its not under question 9), and I think it could be a replacement for question 2, regarding prescriptions. The question I added is more or less about "out of pocket costs" which would include specialists, prescriptions, surgeries, and the like. Feel free to edit if you think it is too specific or too vague. I'm moving question 2 to the bottom under "old questions" now. Also, as much as I like the questions about recreation, I think a lot of people would put "apathetic" as their answer. If we had more questions to ask, I would be really interested in these as survey questions, but since we only have 5, these questions seem out of place. Thoughts? --DeannaOhlfs 16:02, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I've changed question 1 to include options, the old version of the question has been moved under old questions. In regards to the sports, organ/blood donations, and health care costs, I think we should choose one or two to focus on so we can ask specific questions and get enough information to test a hypothesis. Right now, I think we are too spread out in terms of questions. (Melany)

Thanks for editing question 1 Melany, its much clearer now. I think health care costs affect, well, everyone in our survey groups so I think that would be a smart choice to concentrate on. If we were to choose organ or blood donation, however, it would be interesting to ask questions like "why do you choose to donate blood/be an organ donor". --DeannaOhlfs 19:10, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Hey everyone, Good editing with question 2! I personally like the last the question that was posted because it's clear, concise and it gives us a specific result. :) I agree with Deanna. It seems the questions are veered towards costs within the health care system. Should we stick with that one topic or expand it to subjects like blood donation, organ donors? If we were to narrow it down we would get information that would much more relevant to each other. Health care is a broad topic within itself but should we narrow it down more or not? Problem with "why" questions, they are more about opinions and this won't get us specific measurements like for example the last question asking the percentage. Unless we assign certain answers with values. For example with the blood donation one we could assign answers from a list:

Why do you choose to donate blood?

(0) to be a good citizen (1) renew blood (2) because I want to (3) I don't know

They're not the best of answers but what I'm trying to say is that it's hard to answer that question without answering because "I want to" or a variety of answers. What do you all think? (I hope what I wrote make sense...) ----JessicaSanchez 13:02, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I've added one more question. It's just an idea I read for another class. Feel free to edit. --Jessicasanchez 20:27, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree with Jessica about the "why" questions. Most people are probably donating for altruistic reasons, which doesn't tell us much that we didn't already know. For me, the more interesting question is whether or not people donate blood or are registered organ donors. I'd also like to know why people don't donate or register, but I think that would be too difficult to easily capture in a survey where we offer interviewees definitive responses. (Stephanie)

I think the editing on the questions is pretty good so far. However the way that we started the questions seems as if we should continue in the healthcare costs area. I think it might be best if we did continue on that path because if we do want to go in the direction of gauging people's opinion behind blood/organ donations, the first couple of questions wouldn't fit in very well, and should probably be revised. I agree that the 'why' questions about donations are probably hard to answer, but also for such a topic, wouldn't we also have a concern with how honest the answers are, since some people might not want to appear selfish and give an answer they think would make themselves look better? MelissaLi 02:32, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

For question 3, I'm not sure people will immediately recognize the difference between "very familiar" and "thoroughly familiar"; they may appear to mean the same thing to some people. Perhaps we could reword the "thoroughly familiar" option to more easily convey that "very familiar" means "I know most of the details of my health plan" and that "thoroughly familiar" means "I know all of the details of my health plan". For question 5, I really think we need an "I don't know" option. Whenever you ask for people's opinions on public policy, you have to account for those people who don't have opinions, or else the results will be skewed. For question 7, I think it might be worthwhile to offer a "don't know/don't remember" option, because most donors likely signed up when they first got their driver's license, which for some may have been a long time ago. In question 10, I changed the "indifferent" option to "neutral" because people are probably more familiar with that wording in a question like this, and we use "neutral" elsewhere in the survey. I also noticed that the neutral/indifferent option in question 10 is coded differently than it is in question 6, when they should probably both be coded as either 3 or 5 (I vote for 3). Lastly, should we perhaps include "not applicable" and "unknown" as coding options for all questions, for the sake of consistency? (Stephanie)

Hey guys! I joined this group late because i withdrew myself from another group. holy cow it took me 1 hour to read this whole discussion but we really need to narrow down our questions and get rid of the "old survey" thing - since we can only approve of 5 questions. I don't wanna ruin this survey, but public opinion implies YOUR opinion on such topics. I really really want to erase the question on blood sampling and how often have u donated because the information is somewhat useless. (no offense i know u guys worked hard on this) One question i want to impliment is How do u overall rate the Canadian Health care system compared to other nations? 1. very good 2. good 3. neutral 4.somewhat poor 5. poor 99. not applicable - Kevin Choi

I agree, whether someone donates blood or not it slightly irrevelent when trying to find out information about the quality of the health care system as the government does not force you to give blood as a result of having health insurance. We should erase that question. It was a good idea, I just don't feel that it is focused enough on what I believe we're trying to find out. Maybe it could be rephrased along these lines: "Do you believe that blood donation should be compulsory result of Candian health insurance?" But even then i'm not sure we need it...(Alex)

Great editing guys! But I was just thinking, if we plan on keeping questions 5-8 we need to edit them more too, maybe combining 5 with 6 and 7 with 8. That way we'll be closer to a final 5 questions. In terms of the old survey, I don't really see any harm in leaving it there, it's a good way to look back at questions rather than deleting them completely and forgetting them if we need them later. (Amandeep)

Kevin, I disagree with you about the blood donation information being somewhat useless, but I'd be willing to take out those questions because I think that what they measure is quite similar to what the organ donation question measures. That way, we can maintain the spirit of the blood donation questions while also reducing the number of questions by two. Considering your suggested question about people's attitudes toward Canadian healthcare relative to that of other nations, I'm concerned that this assumes too much about the knowledge people have of other nations' healthcare systems. My guess is that many people will compare Canada's healthcare system primarily to the US's, because that's the system about which they hear the most (though of course people who are originally from or have spent a lot of time in other countries will likely use those as their points of reference). The point is that people are likely to only use one or two countries as reference points, so we would have to decide whether or not that reduces the validity of the data. Even then, feelings of patriotism are likely to affect the results, meaning we would have to control for that (which we can't, unless another group is including a question on patriotism). I do like the idea of the question, but I think the limit of five questions seriously inhibits our ability to do it justice. (Stephanie)

I agree with Melissa: I think we should stick with health-care COST related questions, because the majority of our questions are centered around this. Also, I'd like to keep the "old questions" section just because it shows the amount of work that we did do, so we all get full points. Also if someone could add descriptions to the "how well do you know your plan" question that would be great! If not I'll get to it sometime this weekend...--DeannaOhlfs 15:23, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

I just looked back @ our page. We have a good combo of questions about cost if we take questions 1,3,4,9 and 10. They are all related but are geared towards answering different questions. Thoughts?--DeannaOhlfs 15:25, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

I changed the examples in question 9 to better reflect examples of out-of-pocket healthcare costs: specialist care and doctors' fees aren't normally paid out-of-pocket other than through the private system. I also changed the wording in question 3 from "health care plan" to "extended health care benefits" to maintain consistency with question 1. If what is meant by question 3 encompasses more than just extended health care benefits, by all means change it back, but we should clarify what exactly we're referring to. (Stephanie)

I like the idea of focusing on question 1,3,4,9, and 10 like Deanna suggests. Since health care costs seem to be what we are focusing on, these are the questions we should be using. While the other questions are also really interesting, I think we need to start narrowing down which questions are going to be our survey questions and continue refining them. Thanks for changing the wording on question 3, Stephanie, that really needed to be done. Perhaps we should add an option for people that don't have extended health care plans or add something to the question that acknowledges that? (Melany)

Following up on Melany's suggestion, I've changed the wording in question 3 to "If you indicated in question 1 that you have extended health care benefits, are you familiar with these benefits?" (Stephanie)

I think changing the wording to "extended health care benefits" is good in that it specifies that we we're asking about the extra costs that aren't covered under basic health care. I agree that questions 1,3,4,9, and 10 do work well together, but my concern is about the ordering of the questions. I think that we need to decide how to group these questions so that it flows better for people answering our survey. Would it be better to start off with question 4 about people's opinion about how the provincial government is handling basic health care and then go in depth about extended health care costs? And I also think that if we keep question 10 for the end, it might be better to clarify if we're asking about just extended health care costs rising or health care costs in general, or both if the 3 previous questions above it are all about extended health care benefits. MelissaLi 06:30, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Melissa makes a good point about clarifying which rising health care costs we mean in question 10. Personally, I think clarifying that we mean health care costs in general would be a good idea, since that's what most media articles on rising health care costs are referring to. If we go that route, we should probably clarify that we mean *public* health care costs. And since the consensus seems to be that we're going with questions 1,3,4,9 and 10, now would be a good time for anybody opposed to that decision to speak up. (Stephanie)

Hi guys! I think these questions are great, my only concern is with number 9 because I think a lot of people won't necessarily know that and they might find it hard to figure it out. Maybe we should change it a bit so it's less mathematical and more intuitive for the people answering the questions? Everything else looks great! (Allison)

Hey guys! after looking over all our questions carefully and doing a bit of minor editing to some of the wording choices in a few questions I think its best to stick to questions 1,3,4,9,10. But it would be great to still be open to inclusion of questions which are related to the topics introduced in those 5 questions so please lets maintain our old questions section ( as you all know we all are still adding to the question choices as a part of our assingment too). I was thinking it wouldnt be a bad idea to combine questions 1 and 3 since questions #3 in a sense follows question #1 and is to some degree dependent on the answer from question #1,maybe change #3 to 1B) ( I will not edit it this way until you guys let me know what u think) this way we would open up room for an extra question too cuz im sure we are gonna come up with at least a few other strong questions and we could pick one that we all agree should be included to add to the 5 main ones. On another note, I agree with Allison, I think question #9 could be simplified a bit to be less mathematical, choosing a certain percentage of total cost might bring up some technical problems for us later when gathering and observing our data, for many the total cost probably varies from time to time, and the percentage also might be hard to figure out for some respondants or could take extra time that would result in a loss of interest of the people being surveyed or to give an answer which isnt exactly concise. (Niaz)

I'm in agreement about question 9 needing more simplification, either we decrease the options for the amount of percentage options or rephrase it using words? However the problem with using words is that it doesn't give the more precise answers that numbers can give us. For changing question 3 to 1b, I'm not sure that that will necessarily allow us to add another question because wouldn't it still technically be 5 questions? MelissaLi 20:24, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

It seems like there is a lot of debate going on. However, since we can only have 5 questions, can we make it more simply by deleting demographic and old questions??? - Kevin

I absolutely agree with Nias about sticking with questions 1,3,4,9, and 10 because questions 5-8 is (somewhat) irrelevant to the topic. However combining questions 1-3 would make the wording too complicated and people would not want to participate in a survey that requires a lot of thinking. Keeping these questions simple is the most efficient way of going about this survey. - Kevin

I agree on using questions 1, 3, 4, 9, and 10. Having reviewed all possibilities I feel that those are the best questions. And I also agree with Allison: that question 9# should be a bit simpler to understand for the average person. The simpler the better, and our results will be much more concise and easy to analyze. (Alex)

It seems like the majority of the group has chosen to stick with 1,3,4,9 and 10. So I've moved the other questions to the old questions section. Also, I've revised question 9 to reflect the approximate dollar amount spent monthly, as I think most people will be able to think of a monthly cost as opposed to a percentage of yearly costs. I think it is simpler to understand now. Also I agree with Kevin that combining questions 1-3 would be too complex.Also, I reworded question 3. Feel free to change the wording though. --DeannaOhlfs 19:03, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanx for your quick feedback guys. Im glad we have worked our way up to coming up with our top 5 questions. I've changed the wording to Question number 4, the question now is: How satisfied are you with the provincial government's management of healthcare costs? please feel free to change it if you think it still needs editing, and the first two questions will remain seperate then to avoid any confusion. (Niaz)

- I also did a minor edit to the wording of question #9, Thank you Deanna for changing it to a "monthly basis", I think the question and the answer options are much easier to comprehend and work with now. (Niaz)

Thanks Deanna, question 9 looks a lot easier to answer with dollar amounts now. I also like that question 3 is reworded to "do you feel familiar" because that takes away any assumption we have that people are familiar with their health care. Now that we've decided on 5 questions, what does everyone think about the order of the questions? MelissaLi 01:39, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I think the top 5 questions look really good, but I have a suggestion for number 9. Could we put "This includes private health care, prescriptions not covered completely by insurance, and alternative medicine" in paraentheses, to distinguish it from the question? I think it would make the question seem less overwhelming, as it would be more obvious that is part of the description. (Amandeep)

Hi all! These questions look great! I just made a change to the answers in question 4 because they didn't match the question that was being asked. And I have re-numbered them to be our five questions. (Allison)

The new wording of question 3 to "do you feel familiar" is more suitable in my opinion too. I think as Amandeep had mentioned too it would be clever to put a certain part of question 9 which reads (This includes private health care, prescriptions not covered completely by insurance, and alternative medicine) in paraentheses , it will make the question easier to follow with and will identify that section as provided extra discription. I think the order of our top 5 questions is fine the way it is now as it gets from simpler more general ones to more numerical and decisive ones.(Niaz)

I think everything looks great so far. I went ahead and deleted all the other survey questions leaving our 5. I copied and pasted to a word document if u need it but I think its done officially. Except number 6 can use less options instead of 20 dollar ranges. 30 dollar ranges might be better instead of having 6 different options to chose from. Might be a bit confusing. - Kevin

Hi guys. I agree with Niaz's idea, and I just edited the wording of question 2 and 3 for health care. I changed question 2 to "how familiar do you feel with your health care benefits", and i edited question 3 to "to what extent are you satisfied with the provincial government's management of health care costs"? (Yi Han)

I'm not sure if anyone agrees, but I actually think that "Are you familiar with your health care benefits" from before might be a better phrasing of the question because the word "feel" is so subjective. Again, for question 3, adding "to what extent" seems to pose an assumption that people are already satisfied with the government's management of health care costs, but I might just be over-thinking it. MelissaLi 01:13, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Hey Everyone, Nice editing on the questions Yi Han! I think we have a good batch of questions. I see what Melissa means with the questions but we have to make some assumptions. You can't really make a question completely void of assumptions. You just do the best you can. Unless there's another way we can word it, I think "to what extent" should suffice because you're giving them options like "not satisfied to very satisfied". Jessica Sanchez 01:32, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Hey guys, everything looks great!.. i just recoded the answers for question 2 because we had a scale that went 0,1,2,3,5 - i thought it would be good if it matched the scale of question 3 because the answers fall on a similar scale. Let me know what you guys thing about that. (Lisa)

Hi again, i was also just looking at question 5, and i switched around the scale so that "not concerned at all" was given the number "1" and "very concerned" was given the number "5" - rather than the other way around, which it was before. I think it makes more sense that way! (lisa)