Social Tactic #5

Jerrod Goertzen

Soc 122

START

5/9/2014

 

Social Movement Tactic #5: Push Polling

 

            I have done polling and surveys before but never have I ever done push polling. I never knew it even really existed as a tactic as generally you hear for polling and surveys, you want peoples answers to be pretty much their own with no influences in their answering. So this was an interesting tactic to learn about but it was difficult and disheartening at the same time. We used a calling site called Catishack, where we also developed out survey at of fourteen questions about our issue of tuition costs. Each group member was to spend a minimum of two hours over a two week period calling people and trying to get them to take the survey. As a group I would say we had some success in this tactic, but personally I felt like I had none. How my hours worked, I had to set my call times in the morning, this made it very difficult to get a hold of anyone, let alone getting them to take a survey.

            Based on our data though we can see that we had a total of 31 participants, 27 of those accepting to take the survey with the option of at any time being able to skip a question if they chose too. for those that answered, 55% of our participants had at least some college education, with 35% have an associates or bachelors degree. Most of our participants had attended Fresno State or at least knew someone that did. Being that most of our participants have or still are attending Fresno State, it was no surprise that the majority were also aware of the rising tuition cost over the last 5 years. What they were not aware of though was the average student debt of a California student last year. The majority of our participants also felt that the state of California could do more to lessen the burden of tuition costs. A majority of our participants were between the ages of 18 - 24, and being Latino or Hispanic making $10,000 or less, with a nearly even number of people making $10,000 - $50,000.  Based on these facts, it might be safe to say many of our participants were college students themselves still or had recently graduated. Out of our participants, more then double of them were female. For this instance, this could mean that young educated females are more sympathetic to our cause based of that they took the time to take our survey over the phone.

            The biggest thing I personally would have done differently is to have been able to call more in the afternoon or evening in order to possibly get a few more participants. I also wish I could have had more time too call but I was limited due to my daily schedule. To have maybe come up with also some better and more focused questions better suited for push polling.