Questionnaires!

I created small questionnaires that had two questions on them:

What makes you happy?
and
What was the happiest moment in your life?

My aim was to hand them out to a range of different people with different age groups and ways of life, I wouldn't have been able to get a clear idea though as I wasn't asking the people to provide their age nor was I asking them about their backgrounds, it was all based on my judgement.

I began handing the questionnaires out in our Student Union Bar to students, I did this, not only to get an idea of the student views of happiness but also to give me some confidence to head out into Manchester City center to give the questionnaires out to a lot of strangers. Because these two questions are pretty hard to think of an answer for, I gave them out to the people who were sat down, not going anywhere and didn't look busy so they's be able to spend a short while focusing on the questions.

The images above are some of the responses I got from the students in the SU. Overall they express general activities such as drinking, watching football and going on holidays are what make them happy as well as spending time with family and friends. The majority of the student responses seem to be the things that would make us all happy, they don't seem specific or personal to each person.

The image above shows some more answers that I recieved when asking the students in the SU. These, like a few more that I received by students in the SU are all from groups of boys who were sat together. I found that the majority of the groups of boys weren't taking it seriously and just put silly answers. I was hoping not to get a lot of answers like this as it would make it difficult to progress in an honest manner, I wouldn't know what was true and what wasn't, what really made people happy and when people were joking around.

I then made my way to Manchester to ask the general public what their answers would be. I was pretty nervous but was very determined and interested to see what everyone's answers would be so I road on! Since my questionnaires needed time and thought I decided to go to Piccadilly Gardens to hand them out because I thought that would be a good hot spot for people sitting down, on a break from work or just chilling out with their friends, it's not a rushed, fast moving place.

To get these results shown above I asked older people who looked to range from the age of 40 - 75. One of the answers that I found interesting was the bottom left one, it was completed by a 70 odd year old lady, she told me that she was still waiting for the happiest moment of her life to happen, either her life hasn't been a very happy one or she's very optimistic in thinking that something better will always come along! I appreciated this answer because it struck me with something that I didn't expect, it stopped me in my tracks and make me think about my project more. Overall I found that older people are most happy when they're around their family and friends. 

Whilst in Piccadilly Gardens I approached a small group of young adults on what seemed to be a work break, this group of people were very confident, chatty and keen to know about me and my project, they were very honest with their answers unlike what I think the majority that I'd asked had been. I hope to find more people who are confident enough to be completely honest with what makes them happy because more often than not my audience to the video I'll be creating using these results will have these mutual things as to what make them happy which would give them a connection and personal feeling towards what I will be showing. 

There were a very large range of different types of people in Piccadilly Gardens which was useful for what I was aiming to do. At first I received a lot of rejection due to the fact that people didn't know what to write but I moved on until I got enough results. At once point a man came over to me to get me to sign up to a course of talks about further education, I told him I'd sign up if he filled out one of my questionnaires,he agreed so I did what I said I'd do and signed up to what he was promoting...I put down a fake number and got an interesting questionnaire answer from it!

After handing out the questionnaires I had a bit more confidence to yet again attempt to interview a homeless person, I still wanted to do this because I didn't yet know what my final route for this project was going to be and I wanted to keep my options open. I approached 6 homeless man and every one of them said no to the interview even after offering them food/spare change, yet I did persuade them all to fill out one of my questionnaires, I gave them all 30p for doing so. I felt as though I had to give the homeless men money after they filled out my questionnaires because I was getting something out of it too yet I gave the other members of the public nothing for filling them out, this made me think about transactions and returning the favour, I would like to explore this sort of thing more in another, future project.

The image above shows my results after asking 6 homeless men to fill in my questionnaires. The first homeless man that I asked said he couldn't read or write so I offered to write out his answers for him, I sat on the floor with him and asked him the questions, his answer to 'What makes you happy?' was 'anything', I tried to get him to elaborate on his response but he just kept on repeating the word 'anything' so I wrote it down, I then proceeded to asking him 'What was the happiest moment of your life?', I was expecting him to delay his response while he thought about it or for him to tell me he didn't know but right away he said ''Ireland'' so I once again asked him to elaborate, he said it was a holiday he went on with his friends and it was the best time in his life, he didn't tell me when he went or what he did there but I could see from his face that when he was thinking about it, it brought back good memories as he started to smile. I was sat on the floor with this man for about 10 minutes and I know that doesn't seem a long time but when people are walking past you, staring, wondering what you're doing, it seems a lot longer. The floor was cold and uncomfortable and, without sounding horrible, the homeless man didn't smell too pleasant, it's to be expected for someone who lives on the street. He was a nice, polite man who was extremely grateful for the 30p which I handed him for the 10 minutes of his time. After having to write his answers down for him I decided to write all of them apart from one who insisted on writing it for me. The majority of the homeless men expressed their like towards warmth and companionship, just simple things that we take for granted.

I've learnt that the people who are in groups would mostly either write the same answer as their friends or write something silly so if I'm to carry on going in this route I'll make sure to target people sat on their own. I received the results that I imagined I would, the majority of the students answered with things that are related to fun, young adults were confident and truthful, older people wrote all about their family and the homeless people wrote things that most of us might not thin about when thinking of things that make us happy.

I would like to have known more about each person's life and background for my results to have more meaning in the respect that what makes them happy may be influenced by their way of life and age so I will ask my family and friends the same questions because this way I know their backgrounds and ages, this will give me a clearer understanding on what ways of life enjoy what things. By asking people who I know will also allow for them to feel comfortable with me enough to be entirely honest with their answers, once again giving my results more accuracy.