Trust Tommy

Here is the report on my Young Scientist project, entitled Examining the Attitudes of Secondary School Students toward Blogging. Some background:

To do this project, a two page questionnaire was posted out to 13 schools from 5 counties (a copy of which is in the report book). I devised the questionnaire myself after looking at the AIMRO website and getting drafts critiqued by people in the field of blogging.

The first half of the questionnaire was taken up with finding out more about their internet habits, how often they used it and for what purpose they used it for, while the second page dealt with if/how they used blogs and whether they felt they were accurate, trustworthy or a worthwhile use of time.

In total, 11 schools from 4 counties replied, resulting in 1,781 completed questionnaires. Getting help from friends, I inputted the data from them into one big Numbers.app (the Mac version of Microsoft Excel) file. Then, using the sort tool, made up graphs and results.

My main conclusion was that although internet access was high (94% reported having it at home, 97% at school), and social networking usage was prolific (82% were a member of one social networking website; with Bebo being the most popular, followed by Facebook), blogging was not common, with only 34% reporting that they read blogs, and a mere 7% writing them.

In relation to their accuracy and trustworthiness, the majority of responses were negative. However, when I analyzed the answers to those questions by just those who said that they read blogs, the answers were quite positive, leading me to the conclusion that a lack of familiarity is the cause of their unpopularity.

The report is split into numerous PDFs, and is in a .zip folder. It can be downloaded by clicking on this link.

If you have problems opening the file, contact me by email — tommy@collison1.ie (remove the 1) — and I’ll send you it that way.