HW9: Survey Report

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I had conducted an online survey but the result was unfortunately insufficient and somewhat unreliable. The online survey report shows that there are only 18 who responded on my survey which I thought would be more convenient for people to respond but it turn out to be useless. It also shows that, out of these 18 respondents, only one respondent comes from a step family, another one lives with his gay father and straight mother, one from a single father household, two from mother-headed households and the rest of the respondents are from two-parent families. The result would be more reliable and accurate if I just have a larger number of respondents.

As it was suggested by my professor, the types of family structures that I should include in my research paper should depend on the outcome of my survey in order to cover only those types with  gathered information. So based on the result, my research will only include discussions about the effects of single parent households (in general), gay and lesbians families and step and blended families on children's well-being in comparison with those children from two-parent families in measures of school outcomes and substance use and risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, drinking and drug use. This survey was not able to cover other measures of children’s well-being and only focused on these two measures. 

This shows the percentages of students from different family structures based on the total number of respondents (18). It appears that the largest portion constitutes students from two-parent families.

It can be interpreted from this graph that children from LGBT-parented families can perform as well as those children from non-disrupted two parent families while children from single parent and step families perform less than the first two.

Compared to children living in two-parent families, children in single-parent and stepparent families have greater substance use and risk-taking behavior, such as smoking and drinking alcoholic beverages.

The result of this survey supports my assumption that those children living diverse family structures such as single-parent families and step families are worse of across of measure of well-being (measures of school outcomes and substance use and risk-taking behavior like smoking, drinking and drug use) that those children with stable two-parent families or some children with gay or lesbian parents. But still, the scale of the differences among those children is not large and most children are not adversely affected. Compared to children living in two-parent families, children in single-parent and stepparent families have greater substance use and risk-taking behavior, such as smoking, drinking, and drug use.