Assessing the Impact of Violence in Adolescence Through Pre – and Post-Surveys
Throughout the last semester, my CODES research team and I worked closely with the Alton Middle School in Alton, IL. Our goal was to see how violence had affected their lives growing up and if they were around any. We also wanted to take stories they wanted to share and make them digital, digital storytelling. We used pre and post-surveys to get an idea as to what the students were familiar with of violence and digital work. Such as videotaping, recording, imagery, and things like that. We wanted to get an idea of what to expect going into the project that way when they finished their videos we would be able to see what they learned during that time.
The first step was coming up with the questions for the surveys. As a team, we came up with the questions together. We needed to make sure we got the demographics for data and we wanted to get an idea of what they did and didn’t know. After we came up with the questions, I created the survey and plugged the questions into it. Then we double-checked to make sure we liked it and published the survey. After the survey was published, we had some trouble getting it to load but once we did we were able to have them do the survey. The post-survey was a similar experience but we just took our old questions and tweaked some of them slightly and got rid of the ones that didn’t fit in anymore. When they took the surveys, they were told to answer the questions to the best of their ability.
In the pre-survey, we found that most of them joined for different reasons. Some joined because a teacher asked them to, some joined because they were recommended to and some thought the program was about basketball. When asked if they wanted to learn anything within the program some said no and some said they wanted to work on their collaboration skills. Some also talked about wanting to grow their relationships with their teachers and other adults. I do not have results from the post-survey to use but when we asked the students at the end if they liked the program they all said yes. They talked about how they liked being able to get to know their peers and learn more about storytelling. When we asked what their favorite part was, they all said they liked the free food that came with it. While surveys can be very beneficial, I think they can be hard too because if they don’t want to answer, they are very short with their responses, and it is hard to get accurate data from them.
Overall it seems that they learned some storytelling skills and they also learned about collaborating with their peers and telling their stories. I think the experience was good because they also got pushed slightly out of their comfort zone and got to tell stories about their life in a respectful space with people who wanted to hear their stories.