Unit Three Reflection Report
Unit Three Reflection Report
Unit Three is one of the most challenging and interesting units in this course. In this unit, we finally took our research plan into action and made our hands dirty on the research. Working on social-related research is quite interesting since the process is quite different from that in science-related research. Instead of doing experiments and writing software programs, we conducted interviews and surveys to collect data to prove our assumptions.
The data collection part is difficult and time-consuming, and many changes happened out of my expectation. For example, in the interview part of my research, originally, I planned to interview the facilities coordinators from some local companies about their food ordering process. However, when I asked them for the interviews, both of them told me that the food orderings are handling some other employees. Luckily, they have routed me to the right people and my interviews finally completed successfully. At the same time, conducting the survey is also quite difficult since the number of my vegetarian friends is limited. Thanks to my friends who help to distribute my survey to the vegetarian in their network, I got 11 survey responses from the vegetarian people. Although the number of responses is still not large, we can still find some interesting results from them.
Meanwhile, I quite enjoyed the process of analyzing the survey and interview results. Since I have taken many data analysis related classes in my Computer Science program, analyzing the results for the report gave me a great chance to apply what I learnt from the classes into the practice, which is quite beneficial to me. At the same time, google form also provides many good functionalities about the summary of the results, which helps me to analysis them more effectively. Some of the results from the survey are quite surprising to me. For example, originally, I assumed that vegetarian people might go to non-vegetarian restaurants often as there are fewer vegetarian restaurants in Vancouver based on my observation, and I assumed that it can be a good reason why the Futian Dumpling Restaurant should provide vegan foods daily. However, based on the feedback about the choice of restaurants from vegetarian people, many of them still prefer going to vegetarian restaurants instead of non-vegetarian restaurants with vegan foods. This result let me reconsider my proposed solution and help me avoid providing an unreasonable solution to the restaurant, which is quite helpful.
In the peer-review process of the formal report draft, I partnered with Amy and learned a lot from her when reviewing her report. Amy did a great job in designing the figures for the survey results. For example, for the survey answers of numbers 1 to 5, instead of showing the percentages of each number, she divided them into two groups “above 3” or “below 3” and only include the percentages for the two groups, which make the diagram neat and clear. I have noticed that my report contains too much detail statistics of the survey, which may be a little confusing. I will definitively apply Amy’s approach to make my survey results clearer. At the same time, I also give Amy some advice about the figures, grammar, and organization. I hope my advice can be helpful to her.
Overall, Unit Three of the Eng 301 class is challenging and interesting. I hope to work on more interesting and challenging topics in Unit 4. Also, I will continue improving my formal report based on Amy’s suggestion and what I learned from Amy so that I can make a good ending for this class.
First Draft of my Formal Report: