490: Week #4

So last Thursday instead of taking the metro or a bus, we walked to a market on the other side of Termini. It was nice to just walk around. The market didn’t have very many tourists in it. Our challenge for that day was to survey twenty people, ten men and ten women, about their health and how the feel about their healthcare. We were sent with twenty surveys written in Italian and a couple different ways to ask people to take our surveys.

In the beginning, I was kind of skeptical about how this would work, nine American students who speak very little Italian, in one small market asking everyone the same questions. The first group of people I walked up to, I slowly explained to them I was an American student doing a survey on their healthcare, and three of them filled it out. I was off to a great start!

After that, it was a little more difficult. Everyone I asked either had not time to answer, already been asked by someone else, or didn’t want to answer. One thing that happened a lot was that people thought that they were supposed to answer for me, so they were confused.

Overall, I think that it was a success. My group got forty four people to answer the survey. We only had eleven guys though. I’m not sure why guys weren’t as willing to answer. I think that it was a good learning experience though. I got to practice my Italian and learn about the Italian culture a little bit more.