Go Forth and Smolder

We encountered three primary limitations in carrying out this project, all related to the lack of response generated by our survey. First, we recorded 42 total responses, 25 with no ELSJ classes, 14 with one ELSJ class and 3 multiple, resulting in a lack of statistical significance to our data. The scarcity of responses from people who had taken multiple ELSJ classes essentially eliminated this category from any overview of trends and restricted our ability to evaluate the program’s success with people who have chosen to take multiple ELSJ classes. This was a fairly minor limitation due to the fact that we could still pull trends from the data, even if it was not mathematically representative, and then call for further research in order to investigate those trends.

 

The second major limitation was with distributing the survey. Due to privacy concerns, we could only distribute the survey to the two groups we had access to: the University Honors Program and the Class of 2019 Facebook page. These difficulties in distributing the survey resulted in the lack of response mentioned earlier.

 

The third major limitation was a lack of interviews. Due to the format of our project, we were only interested in interviewing people who had already taken an ELSJ class. However, of the 17 respondents to the survey who had taken at least one ELSJ class, only 5 responded to our optional interview request. Of these, we were only able to find a time to interview one due to scheduling concerns and a general lack of response to follow up emails attempting to set up times for the interviews.