Working along with Tom, Matt, Andy and Gavin we identified the problem that not many students are challenging their dietary habits. We identified this problem by analysing the information collected by gathering primary quantitative and qualitative research to start with. The idea of this concept was developed from our individual themes generated from our collection of photos. Tom’s being heavily related to Christmas and food, mine being food & drink with emphasis on takeaways, while Matt’s photos reflected quite a disturbing theme of pigs and dead animals, which we summed up to being related to vegetarians.
Initially we began looking at areas related to food and Christmas with the main target audience being students. Our first questionnaire asked students around LCAD whether they were vegetarian or not, furthering that question by asking if they would attempt not to eat meat for a day, and if ‘Yes’ would they attempt the same thing but on Christmas day. As the deadline till we had to present our identified problem drew nearer, we concluded the idea that student’s should challenge their daily routines and try something different, with our questionnaire results acting as our main backup to our problem. Some of the research that backed up this problem include the fact that although most people asked in the questionnaire were willing to try out being a vegetarian for a day, there was still a small minority that would not even give the idea a chance. Having presented our idea of a problem and after receiving feedback from Fred we came to a point that we needed to clarify our problem, which lead us to the problem that ‘Not enough students are willing to challenge their dietary habits.’
The methods of gathering evidence to backup our problem were divided into primary and secondary qualitative and quantitative research. The primary quantitative included questionnaires, online surveys and documented discussions. With these methods, we were able to gather numeric data to form statistical charts, graphs and tables. Although this was useful for statistics, we needed information about why people were happy with doing the same things and eating the same kind of food everyday. As students ourselves, we had to ask questions like ‘Why are we always drinking coffee and eating sandwiches for lunch?
We wanted to identify why there is this trend in student living and the effects of our society. With this motive, we carried our a few qualitative research processes. These were in forms of daily photographic documentations of our daily routines and what we ate. We all attempted this to generate a basic idea of our daily trends. This was useful in our research because by doing this, we can try to identify the relationship between what we do in our lives and how that affects what we eat. From this form of research, we concluded that in many cases, the cause of this problem is often related to the expense of alternatives, time, organisation, effort and knowledge of cooking.
Moving on from this, we decided that we needed more information to backup our problem and to further identify the reasons behind this problem to be able to deliver an efficient response. We carried out a series of video interviews, discussing methods of cooking, testing and comparing the knowledge of students and non students in Leeds. We decided to do this in video format because we wanted to gather as much information as possible, we wanted to interview people and gain an understanding about their experience and knowledge on cooking. In comparison to questionnaires, by allowing the students to express their opinions verbally, we can gather an idea on how fluent they know the process of cooking aswell as learning about their techniques etc. The interviews were all done in the same format, the students/ non-students being interviewed were all required to state their age and occupation at the start. A series of ingredients were presented to the individual and they were required to come up with an idea of what they would do with the ingredients. Although this was useful in understanding and seeing the contrast of people’s responses, the main problem of this form was that we had too much information, which made it incredibly difficult to conclude. We resolved this problem by writing out every word of the interviews and analysed what the students said in comparison to the non-students. In the future, we could attempt a live cooking challenge, where instead of verbally explaining the process of cooking, they had to actually make what they had in mind. This would deliver a more accurate idea of their experience and knowledge.
Looking back at the work produced, the only thing we could improve on would be to incorporate some more interactive research methods, which would gather more accurate and realistic results. This was however restricted by the time we had.
Five things I would do differently….
1. Be more proactive
2. To do something and find out results rather than making presumptions and not doing it.
3. Be more positive about the project.
4. Could have pushed my ideas a bit more.
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