Question content, Scope, Purpose

Hi All,

I’ve gone through everyone’s discussion contributions and would just like to first say that I am so thankful for working with such a focused and passionate group on this survey assignment. I do really like the topics that we have come up with so far especially regarding immigrant services. As much discussion has already been made on the topic itself, I’d like to take the time to examine the survey aspect of this project.

Here, I have to agree with Lucy. I feel that we have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves. Since this survey is only five questions long, it would be really difficult to find anything if we spread the questions out to much. I think rather than having five questions targeting different areas, it might be better if we had a succession of topics on the same topic. I think that before we really try to make our survey questions, we should first come up with a specific topic. Like we have been taught to do in class, we should first propose a theory then generate a hypothesis; only after that can we move into formulating concrete survey questions. Otherwise I feel that our survey would cover too broad a topic and the results we receive may not be enough for a good analysis.

Therefore, after reading through the previous discussions and recaps, it seems that we all have an interest in immigration opportunities once they arrive in Canada. However, I think we should also keep in mind who our demographic target is. Some questions/roadblocks we might encounter are:

• Are we as a group going to go out and look for recent immigrants to do our survey? Or are we going to focus on student groups in UBC? Or do we want a range of both? – I think our survey demographic will have a large impact on our result. Immigrant or International university students will have a different level of income on say a refugee – how are we going to analyze or value this? – As well are we willing or do we have the time to go into our communities and look for respondents? o Also, how do we differentiate rich immigrants from poor ones? o Will immigrants be willing to reveal their level of income? (some people may feel uncomfortable with this, so how do we phrase this question) o Maybe we should target students so it is easier to carry out our survey? • If we are looking at a predominantly immigrant base, depending on whether they are new/old immigrants our group may have trouble communicating due to language barriers. Do we, within our group have people who are multilingual enough to guarantee a diverse demographic of respondents? o How do we phrase the questions so our survey respondents don’t get confused with the language? Or how do we communicate the survey to them (Orally or Written)? o Perhaps it may be easier if we narrow our survey down to comparing between two groups instead having a great span. This might make it easier to communicate and narrow our survey down and not have it so ambitious. • The last pitfall might be how do we eliminate survey bias. As an example, if we finished our survey questions and decided to ask them, how will we do it? Will we send it to all of our friends on MSN/Facebook or will be stand somewhere and ask random people. In both these situations we risk incurring a lot of biased responses. Are friend circles are probably pretty narrow and like minded. And if we stand somewhere random we might only get the type of people that frequent that area.

Ideally, I think we should within the next few days narrow down what is it exactly that we hope to get out of this survey, be it how comfortable new immigrants feel when they arrive in Canada, how easy it is to assimilate into I suppose Vancouver culture, or the difference between poor and rich immigrants. Does anyone want to propose a theory? A hypothesis? • A possible preliminary question would be – Do Chinese immigrants find it easier to assimilate because there is a large Chinese community in Vancouver as opposed to _________ other immigrant group?

We should finalize what our survey demographic would be. (Personally I think UBC students would be easiest to survey since we have access to them)

Anyways, thank you for reading my very long post. I am looking forward to our future discussions. (Also should we set a time to meet up?)