Survey Project Reflection*

In this project, our topic was "Travelling Habits of Japanese". Through this project, we would like to know more about the cultural values between Hong Kong people and native Japanese. Although the topic seemed to be very easy, I did find difficulties to gather data from various aspects.

For the Japanese culture, it appeared to be quite similar to Eastern values in general. But when it comes to a choice between travelling within Japan or overseas, more interviewees preferred travelling within Japan. It shows that the Japanese love their country very much, even when it comes to spending money within their country to boost up their economy.

For the research method, I have learnt to design a set of effective survey questions. This is not an easy job since there must be some blind spots when we were designing. If we could ask for more opinions from teachers and friends, this would not be a problem. Also, we had to ask native Japanese to help in this survey through friends and online platforms. While asking them, we also categorized their age group to obtain opinions from people with different values.

If I could make changes to this project in the future, I would modify the questions with wider choices and open questions to further investigate the values of Japanese. I would also add questions asking the interviewees' career and their salaries as they are big variables to other answers.

It is such a pity that the Japan earthquake happened within our research period. Before the tragedy, I could still get some responses from native Japanese. However, after the tragedy, I felt sorry for their experience and would not like to interrupt to ask them. I would suggest a longer period of time for this research so that we can have more time to gather a larger sampling group and the results we obtain would reflect more of the reality.

If it is possible, I hope to have some project activities which involve more participation in experiencing the Japanese cultures such as "origami", "chadou(茶道)" or wearing "yukata". These activities can show the conscientiousness of Japanese. I think these activities will be fun for students to enjoy while they are learning.

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