Progress Report Kevin Stefanye, Brian Critterden, Richie Parks, Brandon Kang

Our fieldwork project is coming along pretty well. We’ve already learned a great amount about procrastination, its neurological and environmental causes, its effects on people, among other things. Although we have learned a lot since we began our projects, there is still much more to learn.

            We have divided the work amongst ourselves, where Brian and I have done a lot of the writing, while Richie has made surveys and emailed them out to everybody. The surveys that Richie made include demographic information, such as gender, age, and major. Kevin has already handed my surveys out to two of his teachers and some of his hall mates, and has gotten some good information. We can already see in Kevin’s survey answers that students are much more inclined to procrastinate than teachers are. Also, we can see that the students use technology such as social media, television, video games, and especially cell phones much more frequently and for longer periods of time than the teachers, although he has only asked two teachers, which is not nearly large enough for a sufficient sample size to make such a determination. Although our research is not yet extensive, it seems that our hypothesis of technology causing procrastination and of students procrastinating more than teachers might be accurate. Again, we only have a correlation, but we cannot yet prove causation.

            After reviewing comments made by Miss Palmer on the cover letter and survey questions, we plan to meet and make some changes to both of these documents. For our cover letter, we plan to clarify and expand more about our procedure and outline of our research. For our survey question sheet, we need to make possible changes to the title, to the forms of technology, and expand our options for time spent on technology. We could also add questions including if they engage in technology use, what year they are, what race, what nationality, etc. We may want to look into personal interviews as well.  

            One thing that we have not made much progress on is the results of our surveys. We have not yet found the time to convene and discuss the results of our surveys, which would give us a lot more information about procrastination and how it is affected by technology. I am writing this progress report only with the results of Kevin’s findings, but once we all share what we have discovered, I believe we will be able to confirm our hypothesis.