Evaluation
My results told me basic information about how attractive Stratford is to tourists, but the information we collected was not as informative as I would have liked them to be. The results I got were fairly accurate, but not all of them because a lot of them were based on our opinions which meant that they were subjective. The effect of having incorrect results could effect on how I answer and analyse my main question. If I got the wrong amount of pedestrians for example then, my result for the average amount of people to visit Stratford would be incorrect. So to change how accurate my results were, if I was to do it again I would have more than one person doing the pedestrian and then getting an average from that then doing it two or three times more in the same spot then get another average or we could have compared it with another groups piece of work and get an average from that. Another thing wrong with the pedestrian count was you may miss or double count some of the people walking past us. When we counted people we probably counted people as workers or locals meaning we counted people who weren’t tourists, meaning that our results was correct for our hypothesis.. A way to improve the way we did this to more accurate results is if we went on a day (like a Saturday) then there would be more people there for us to count because then people wouldn’t be at work. We may have also used a digital method to get more accurate results. We could have also recorded which direction the flow of pedestrians were going then we could get an idea of which attraction the people were going to helping us answer whether Stratford is attractive to tourists or not.
Another method of collecting data which was partially inaccurate was the questionnaire. We went on a day where there were not very many people who have come from far away, and also it was a work day so the like pedestrian counts people were either workers or locals. Also it was winter when we went and most tourists would probably have come over in the summer, when it was hotter to a location which contains physical attractions. We didn’t get very good results from the questionnaires because we went had a biased approach to people, which meant that we couldn’t get results from people with maybe a different background in culture. Also there were not people there that had a variety of ages, it was all limited to ages after retirement so it a one sided-view. So the solutions would be to go again in the summer, when there will be people off work, so a week-end and younger people will be off school for the holidays. Also we would make sure we were not biased so we could get different opinions. Also we could have used systematic sampling, so then we could have asked the fifth person who walked past us.
Two of the other ones which perhaps had inaccuracies were the environmental survey and the bi-polar. The information we got from these would have been inaccurate because they are subjective. So the results we got were not always right, because people have different opinions. A way we could have solved this would be by having criteria to follow such as, must be more than 6 pieces of rubbish in 2m2 to be classed as dirty. This would mean that the results were more accurate and could be easily compared with other sites. We could also have done more than one in each area, which means that we can get an average from the surveys so it isn’t based on one opinion. We could have also done them in more five areas. This would mean that the results that we would get would give us a better opinion as to why Stratford is attractive to tourists.
I used a wide variety of data presentation methods such as: bar charts, scatter graphs, pie charts, chloropleth map, kite graph and bi-polar graphs. All of the charts and graphs were good presentational methods because they are really easy to read and collect data and information from. The only one that isn’t very clear is the kite graph because it was very crammed together, but it is still a good way to present information from an environmental survey. To improve I could have done an overlay map to show the relationship between the pedestrian count and the price comparisons.
To change the overall project I would have gone at a different time of the year. This would have most likely been the summer because this way more adults and children would have been off school, so then we could get a variety of results to answer why Stratford is attractive to tourists. Also, prices may rise when there are more customers in the shopping streets, so the price comparison numbers would have changed. I would have also chosen more than 5 areas to do, because then we could evaluate places that are busier or places on the outskirts because they might be in Stratford for different reasons, which means that it could help me answer my main question, about how is Stratford attractive to tourists.