For my survey I decided to find out:

• if parents think that teenage crime in our area is influenced by violence on TV, computer gaming, the Internet or music
• what they already do to control their use of screen-based media
• whether mothers and fathers have different opinions
• if they would be interested in attending workshops.

I produced a draft questionnaire which was tested by three adults with teenage children (my form tutor, my mother and my auntie). I made a number of changes to the questionnaire as a result of their feedback.

I handed copies of my questionnaire to 60 parents as they arrived for Year 10 parent evening. Some people left without returning a completed from but I am very pleased that I got 50 back. I stayed in the hall all evening just in case anyone needed help, but no-one seemed to have any difficulty understanding the questions or filling in the form. Unfortunately, a lot more mothers filled in a form than fathers. This means that there is a gender bias in my results. Also, all the parents had children in Year 10 so they may not be representative of all St Ann's parents.

I created a spreadsheet to analyse my results. I used one row for each response and used a SUM function to check that I had entered 50 responses per question. I copied the first sheet to create graphs or tables for each question. I used all the data I collected in my report to the Parent Teacher Association. Most of the graphs were straight-forward showing answers to individual questions, but I also produced some charts that combine the answers to two questions e.g. interest in workshops (by gender). I used the data sort feature to help me do this.

The most difficult aspect of this work was producing a copy of my spreadsheet for my ePortfolio. At first I could not get the graphs to show in the htm version and had to create separate pdf documents for each one and make a link from the spreadsheet to them.

When I created my initial plan I did not think about handing out the questionnaires at a parents evening so I allowed quite a lot of time for people to return the forms. Getting them all back on one evening was much better. The time I saved was needed to put the data into the spreadsheet and produce all the graphs. This took a lot longer than I thought and was quite boring to do. My friend Charlotte picked ten completed questionnaires at random and checked that I had entered the data into the spreadsheet accurately. Preparing the spreadsheet for the ePortfolio also took a long time.

I think I carried out this task well. One area for improvement is the size of the sample. I think it would be better to hand out the questionnaire at parent evenings for different year groups. Also a sample of 50 is quite small for the size of our school. We have more than 2000 parents.

The question about workshops allowed parents to tick all three. It would be better for them to put them in order of favourite.

I think the survey enabled me to make some sensible recommendations to the Parent Teacher Association.