Blue Turf Poll

This year Luther College installed a blue turf on the college's football field. I saw some interesting discussions on Facebook about the blue turf, mostly by alumni. I was not sure, however, how the student population felt about it. 

Unrelated to the new blue turf, this year I am teaching the Political Science Senior Seminar here at Luther, titled Media and the Political Process. In the beginning of the year I gave the nine students a choice between doing a traditional research paper individually, or work together as a group on an issue related to media and politics. They all chose to work together on one project related to polling and survey in Political Science. This is how the Norse Organization for Research and Polling (NORP) was created. 

Their first "snap poll" (a quick poll asking a question important to the Luther community on Facebook and Twitter) asked how people felt about the new blue turf (which can only be blue because Boise State was cool with it).  Below is the group's report of the results of their poll. 

Brief Analysis of Data

​After closing the study, the NORP statistical analysis went through the raw data and removed all of the answers from duplicate IP addresses, approximately 8 repeat answers, and we ended up with 291 responses in total. Of the 291 in total, 254 respondents were students (87.3 percent of respondents), eighteen of the respondents were past Luther students (6.2 percent of respondents), and seventeen of the respondents were faculty or staff (5.8 percent). Two respondents did not answer their affiliation (.7 percent).

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 What is Margin of Error?

The margin of error provides an estimate of how much the results of the sample may differ due to chance when compared to what would have been found if the entire population was interviewed (1)

Margin of Error (MoE), for our 90 Percent Confidence

​Love it MoE (+/- 4.9%), range of 28.2-38%
Like it MoE (+/- 4.5%), range of 20.3-29.3%
Take it or Leave it MoE (+/- 4.2%), range of 16.7%-25.1%
Dislike it MoE (+/- 3.6%), range of 10.2%-17.4%
​ Hate it MoE (+/- 2.7%), range of 4.8-10.2%
Fall 2017 Estimation in Consideration of MoE Total Fall 2017 Enrollment: 2053 Love it: 579-780 students Like it: 417-602 students Take it or Leave it: 343-515 students Dislike it: 209-357 students Hate it: 99-209 students

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Discussion and Analysis:

The sample size of students who took this study was around 12.4% percent of the student body (254 students), but when presenting these results we must confront the potential of the non-response bias, which is likely to occur in our survey due to student apathy towards the blue turf. In this case, we believe that the answer “Take it or Leave it” has the potential to be higher than we have found in this survey. However, our purpose of this survey wasn’t to measure student apathy, but rather which opinions students had towards the new blue turf. We acknowledge that the non-response has a prominent impact on our results, and that the answer ‘Take it and Leave it’ is most likely underreported, but will move forward with the fact that our findings are generally more in favor of the blue turf than against it.

With this in mind, our findings show that more students are generally in favor of the blue turf. Even if our findings are slanted in disfavor of the blue turf, 48.5% of students we sampled have a positive view of the blue turf, in comparison to 27.6% of students having a negative opinion of the blue turf. We found these numbers by utilizing the lowest possible percentage of our ‘Love it’ and “Like it’ Margin of Error, and the highest possible percentages from the margin of error for our ‘Dislike it’ and ‘Hate it’ answers. An alternative reading, slanted in favor of the blue turf, where we maximize positive opinions in the upper range of the margin of error, and minimize negative opinions using the lowest range of the margin of error, show a difference of 67.3% to 15% favoring favorable blue turf opinions.

​ In short, the sampled students are in favor of the blue turf.

Citations:
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(1) Roper Center, “Polling Fundamentals- Total Survey Error,” Cornell University, https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/support/polling-fundamentals-total-survey-error/, (Accessed 10 October 2017).

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