The Analysis of Our Survey

Many days ago in the class, we answered a couple of questions in a survey about how our preference between being a group and being an individual and how we think about relationships and business success which one is more important. As everyone knew, the survey was conducted by asking our opinion and then let us to give the score ranging between 1 and 10. (Less score means that our choice is to being group in the first question and in the second question fewer score is that we prefer the relationships whilst more scores in both questions interpret in the other way) At first, I don’t pay attention on the results because our lovely teacher don’t mention about it anymore. Nevertheless, when I found the article in NewScientist, I have changed my mind and I immediately looked the statistical results of our survey.

According to “How your ancestors' farms shaped your thinking”, Farmers who grow rice seem interdependence because paddy rice takes a lot of effort that a farmer cannot easily do so he basically ask the help of friends and neighbors to do that so their relation is strong and essential, whereas farmers who plant wheat fundamentally look far more individual since a wheat farm requires a lot of less endeavor than paddy rice so even a single farmer can handle the whole farm by himself and consequently they pretty care about their prosperity first. Based on this aspect and the fact that most Asia countries, especially in East Asia, generally cultivate rice, while the western countries mainly grow wheat, these might indirectly cause a consequence that the attitude of people in East Asia region prefer to being group with overwhelming good relationship but the people in Western region favor stay individual with caring about the success.

The survey results of our class

I think it’s quite interesting to look upon our survey results. At the first inspection of the bar graphs, in particular the relationship-business success graph, I felt surprised and also though about the thing that Peter said in the class “It’s surprised me” so I supposed that it might be the same feeling and the same thing. The surprising fact of the graph is that the mode of the relationship-business success bar chart is equal seven which tend to be similar to the western countries. This raised a question that “do our result survey on the priority between relationship and business success contradict with what had been reported on the NewScientist article?” However, if we consider the mode of the group-individual graph, it conforms to the “How your ancestors' farms shaped your thinking” reported. When I roughly determined the overall distributions of both graphs, they had been found that the group-individual graph skewed to the right whereas the relationship-business success graph tended to be left-skewed. Again, this seemed to contrast the article in the NewScientist in case of the relationship-business success graph.

Nevertheless, when I considered the mean of that the group-individual graph and the relationship-business success chart, their means are 4.73 (S.D. = 1.83) and 4.93 (S.D. = 2.05) respectively. My question was vanished because these means tended to follow the NewScientist report.

By the way, I think that the evaluation of the trend of this kind of graph by considering only mean is unfair because if some people have a strong opinion on the one side, it will directly influence the overall mean. For example, in the first question, if there are two persons who did the survey, the first person answer by scoring the opinion at 1 while the second person give the score at 7. By this scenario, the mean of the first question will be equal 4 which infer that they’re more likely to being a group but actually there is one person to agree in each side. Therefore, I think that we should take the number of persons for each side into account. Consequently, I use the following criteria to divide the side. If the score is less than or equal 5, the number of person who prefer being a group was counted for the first question and the figure for persons who give the priority for the relationship was increased for the second question. If the score is greater than or equal 6, the opposite side will be counted. By this strategy, we can know the side that we choose in the survey. In the first question, after using this criterion, it had been shown that 66.66% agree with being group while only 33.33 % would rather be individual. For the second question, 54% of us give the priority for the relationship whereas 46% prefer the business success. These results still followed by the NewScientist report. Nonetheless, one of noticeable things is that the result in the second question is pretty close. Note that, I found one interesting thing on the raw data that the scores were given at 8 and 7 for the first and second question in order. By my assumption, these score might be voted by Peter because they are equal the Australia score in this link. I’m not sure that we should determine it as the outlier or not. In case that we defined these scores as the outlier and removed them, the overall distributions will shift to left side of the graphs a little bit more. That will be more consistent to the NewScientist article.

According to “Improving CQ: Understanding Culture Values” in the Quest 2 Reading and Writing, the masculinity can be seen in some cultures and its characteristic is that male prefer success while female would rather be harmony. I think that it will be more interesting if we can look further in the detail of data by also considering gender. I’m also curious that in the past, the trends of these graphs were shifted to the left side far more present or not because I think that currently we numerously receive western cultures in our lifestyle. I believe that the discussion with more detail and look in many aspects can broaden our perspective and shape up our mind.

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Reference

Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.) (pp. 20). New York: McGraw-Hill.
MacKenzie, D. (2014, May 8). How your ancestors' farms shaped your thinking. NewScientist Life. Retrieved May 12, 2014 from http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25538-how-your-ancestors-farms-shaped-your-thinking.html#.U25dCvmSxik