Pilots Needed For Survey!!!

Hang 4 said:
I took the survey also. Pretty darn good for a HS student. Suspect some of the feedback has been a learning experience as well. Also good to see Sonali continuing to participate and roll with the punches.
Click to expand...
noahfong said:
I just did the survey.

I found it to be a reasonable survey. Like RgBeard, I thought it could have been tweaked but pretty exceptional for a high school project. I didn't find it biased although I have the distinct impression the main objective is to determine how covid impacted the aviation training/ student pilot community and the impact it may have on alleviating the pilot shortage (yeah - I know - some of you don't believe there's a shortage).

Good job. All my best!
Click to expand...
Half Fast said:
You've learned quite a bit, I hope, about how unintentional and unnoticed biases can sway a survey and produce incorrect results. You've also learned, though you may not realize it, a little tiny bit about how to construct a survey intentionally to produce desired results.

This opens up a whole new ballgame.

If you go into research as a career, you will possibly work for a research firm that gets hired to conduct research for businesses, governments, news organizations, etc. Sometimes they're truly seeking accurate data, perhaps to inform and influence product development, and you need to know how to get it for them. But other times they will want to use research to sway public or customer opinions. Knowing how to conduct a survey to get a result, and do it unobtrusively, is also a marketable skill. (I won't get into the ethics of it here, but I consider it in the same genre as marketing, not science, per se.)

Trust me - when Battlecreek Breakfast Foods, Inc., asks you for a survey, what they're looking for is proof that Krispi-Krunchies is the tastiest and healthiest cereal of all time. The Ironlung Tobacco Company will be looking for data that demonstrates that their cigarettes are quite healthy and that cigarette breath combined with tobacco-stained teeth are considered very sexy indeed.

And when Reid-Hillview airport wants an environmental study, they'll be paying you to prove that lead from avgas is causing brain damage in children so that they can shut down the airport and sell the land to real estate developers. You can read a ton about that fiasco here on PoA.

Knowing that this sort of "research" can be done, how it's done, and that it is done, should make you very skeptical of any studies you read. A healthy degree of skepticism will serve you well.
Click to expand...
Thanks for all the help and feedback!!
 
I'm not convinced that COVID-19 is primarily responsible for making aviation training expensive. The reality is that aviation training has always been expensive.

As far as the pandemic went, personal flying was one of the safest activities going, especially in the early days when vaccines were not available for personal protection, especially for those a high risk of poor outcomes. I probably put it double my usual annual flight hours during 2020 and 2021. On the other hand, getting instruction or refresher training (flight reviews and/or IPCs) was very difficult for a while, and supply chain issues certainly made maintenance sporty at times, and for some items even to this day.

Bottom line, a 100-year global pandemic is going to have enormous financial and societal impacts, and I don't know that there is much one can do to make those impacts go away quickly. This global pandemic, like the 1918 flu pandemic, took a typical 2-3 year course to peak and reach the current low level of stasis.

A not-well-publicized little tidbit (it doesn't have enough entertainment value for what passes for "news" today.) is that the biomedical research community banked a boatload of structural biochemistry of key proteins in the related SARS virus, which emerged in 2002. The knowledge gained from that research, which took about a decade, provided us with a huge head start in the development of vaccines that prevented many deaths over the 2-3 years required for things to run their course for SARS-CoV-2. Had we not had that head start, we might still be struggling to develop highly effective vaccines, as the spike protein is a tricky little immunological target to package. We may not be as lucky next time, but there were some amazing technological advances spurred by the COVID-19 outbreak that will serve us well in the future.
 
Racerx said:
Don't need to read it to have some pretty negative feelings on the teacher based on nothing more than your dialogue in this thread.
Click to expand...
Right, he basically threw us out in the deep end even though it was our first time doing anything like this. And we practically learned nothing about how to analyze the data in our research and had to figure it out on our own. But I’m glad I passed and had this experience so I can improve with future research projects in college.
 
Sonali Bhat said:
Right, he basically threw us out in the deep end even though it was our first time doing anything like this. And we practically learned nothing about how to analyze the data in our research and had to figure it out on our own. But I’m glad I passed and had this experience so I can improve with future research projects in college.
Click to expand...
I think most of us believed you did really well and deserved better. All the best! Hope to hear more from you.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top