Public Opinion Experiment

    

As the group pollster, I tried a variety of methods to get data from the general public. I posted the link to my poll on my Instagram, which has around 1.2K followers. In this way, I collected data through voluntary response that was not too invasive and was somewhat random as it requested participation from a variety of demographics. However, since this was voluntary, I didn’t receive enough respondents through this method alone. Instead, I began messaging people at random, individually requesting them to complete the poll. Though this also had somewhat of a voluntary aspect to it, I gained a greater number of responses this way because I was directly asking for input. However, this method could be classified as “invasive” and was not as random. Therefore, it might have yielded less accurate results.

The public consensus we gathered from the poll helped us add parts to our proposal that we didn’t think of before. For example, when we asked participants who did not experience menstrual cycles how knowledgeable they were on the topic, they responded with an average rating of 6.04 on a scale from 1 to 10. This indicates a minimal to moderate level of understanding of periods and their products, leading us to add menstrual education to our proposal. In order for distribution of products to be normalized, education around its necessity must be improved as well. Similarly, when we asked participants who had cycles how accessible products were to them, they responded with an average rating of 8.95 on a scale from 1 to 10 - displaying high accessibility in the Bay Area. However, in the optional explanatory response, several respondents added that this was not the case in public spaces. According to one such respondent, “[Products are] accessible at home. [It’s] a little scary when I’m outside though because not all bathrooms have products or products that are comfortable.” As public distribution seems currently unreliable, we chose to emphasize distribution of products in public spaces in our proposal.

--Aditi Aswin

(Public Opinion)