The focus of my field research was to attempt to discover people’s opinions of the NSA mass data collection programs. There are various surveys showing opinions on the Internet, but none specifically focusing on the area where I lived. So, I decided to create my own survey. Based on the general topic, I decided that most people would have a negative opinion, as America was founded on principles of freedom from government intrusion. As for my choice of a survey, I decided on it because a survey provides a relatively large of information in a relatively short amount of time from a large population. My population of interest was people in Brooklyn, specifically around the areas I frequent. I used a random sample, along with some clustering. Including
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Excluding the high school data, those in the ’26-39’ range dominated, occupying 20% of participants. ‘Hispanic/Latino’ was the dominant ethnicity, unsurprising given the dominant ethnicity in my high school being ‘Hispanic/Latino’. I was not surprised to find that people who use the Internet “at least once daily” dominated, given today’s society. One surprise was the lack of awareness among surveyed participants. 38% did not know what the NSA mass data collection programs were and 65% did not which programs were the NSA mass data collection programs. Finally, the majority of respondents chose to have Internet surveillance and telephone metadata program stopped.
What surprised me was the low correlation between various variables. Ethnicity had a low correlation with opinion (26%) and so did sex (22%). Indeed, the highest correlation between two variables was a moderately strong one between awareness and opinion, by 0.49. Ethnicity had a low effect on people’s opinion, only having a coefficient of 0.26. Another curious result was the correlation between age and opinion, -0.32. It should also be noted that people’s opinions poorly correlated with their awareness, having a correlation coefficient of
Excluding the high school data, those in the ’26-39’ range dominated, occupying 20% of participants. ‘Hispanic/Latino’ was the dominant ethnicity, unsurprising given the dominant ethnicity in my high school being ‘Hispanic/Latino’. I was not surprised to find that people who use the Internet “at least once daily” dominated, given today’s society. One surprise was the lack of awareness among surveyed participants. 38% did not know what the NSA mass data collection programs were and 65% did not which programs were the NSA mass data collection programs. Finally, the majority of respondents chose to have Internet surveillance and telephone metadata program stopped.
What surprised me was the low correlation between various variables. Ethnicity had a low correlation with opinion (26%) and so did sex (22%). Indeed, the highest correlation between two variables was a moderately strong one between awareness and opinion, by 0.49. Ethnicity had a low effect on people’s opinion, only having a coefficient of 0.26. Another curious result was the correlation between age and opinion, -0.32. It should also be noted that people’s opinions poorly correlated with their awareness, having a correlation coefficient of