POLL
Question 1: Do you think hunting, fishing, and harvesting wildlife should be a constitutional right?
A. Yes
B. No
C. I don't hunt, fish, or harvest wildlife
D. I don't know/care
Question 2: Should the state legislature be allowed to regulate hunting, fishing, and harvesting wildlife to certain seasons or should you be allowed to hunt and fish whenever you like?
A. During approved seasons
B. Whenever I please
C. Only to manage population control
D. I don't know/care
Question 3: Should hunters need a permit or license to hunt big game?
A. Yes
B. No, I should be able to hunt big game if I please
C. I don't know/care
Question 4: What would you consider to be reasonable restriction?
A. Certain percent of the game population
B. Exclude mating season
C. Both of these restrictions
D. Neither of these restrictions
Above are the total results of the poll as a whole. The graph shows total responses for each question. They are not broken down by any demographic of any sort. Overall, it seemed that many people that answered the poll didn't hunt or didn't know/care that hunting should be a right of the people as defined by the Constitution of the United States. However, the same group of people thought that you should have a license and should only allowed to be hunt during approved seasons without any restriction.
When broken into groups between Honors students and Gen. Ed. students, it seemed that the Honors students weren't typically interested in hunting and that the Gen. Ed. students were impartial to either side. Answers C and D were selected most often as expected by the pollsters.
To no surprise, there were far less females that cared about hunting and fishing than there were males. Men tended to believe that hunting should be a Constitutional right whereas females said they don't hunt or fish. Question 2 showed that both men and women, regardless of their answer to Question 1, felt that hunting should only be allowed during approved seasons. The majority of responses, regardless of gender landed on answers A and C for Question 3. People either believed that you need a license, or they didn't care. Question 4 was nearly identically split between restricting hunting/fishing and not restricting it at all.
Voters involved in extracurriculars were far outnumbered by those who were not involved in extracurriculars, as displayed in the graphs. It is difficult to determine a correlation based on the results, although most of the votes were tallied reflected lack of knowledge or personal preference on the matter.
Randomness
Randomness was fairly easy to achieve during this polling project. The only thing that we did specifically was make sure we got an even number of both males and females. We kept a separate spreadsheet for each gender to keep things organized. As far as randomness goes, we basically just asked people that we didn't know or recognize. Asking around at lunch was the best way to achieve randomness because people sit, well, at random throughout the area.
Possible Sources of Error
When trying to achieve randomness it is fairly easy to also make some errors. For example, 70% of the people that we polled were not involved in any sort of extracurricular, whether that be athletics or club involvment. This was actually a very surprising to our group because we thought more of the school was involved than it actually is. With an error like this, our results are going to be skewed much more towards the side of people not involved in any extracurricular activities. Also, there may have been an extremely slight error in counting of the votes, but that seems really unlikely. Also, the order in which our answers were read off to the person being polled may have influenced their decision in identifying an answer.
