Jacob Hirsch
Fighters For Fighters
3rd Social Justice Blog Post
Washington Square Park, Survey On Basic Veteran Issues and Veteran Facts, On Friday January 16th 2015
On Friday January 16th our Social Justice (Fighters For Fighters) group was interested to see what people already knew about Veteran issues. So our group wrote up a very simple 5 question yes or no survey. The 5 questions were did you know 1 out of 4 homeless people on the street have served in the military? Did you know every 65 minutes a veteran commits suicide? Did you know the military does not provide free PTSD medication for returning soldiers? Did you know 20% of returning veterans have PTSD? Did you know veterans account for 20% of all suicides? Our results gave us a very clear understanding of what regular people on the street actually know. We asked 25 people these 5 questions and the results were not good in terms of what people know. For the 1st question “did you know 1 out of 4 homeless people on the street have served in the military” the results were 21% did know this fact and 79% did not know. For the 2nd question “did you know every 65 minutes a veteran commits suicide” The results were 5% of people we asked did know this and 95% of people did not know this. For the 3rd question “did you know 20% of returning veterans have PTSD” the results were 32% of people did know this and 68% did not know this. For the 4th question “did you know the military does not provide free PTSD medication for returning soldiers” the results were 74% did know this and 26% did not. For the 5th and final question “did you know veterans account for 20% of all suicides’ the results for this question was ridiculous, 0% of the people we asked knew this and 100% of the people we asked did not know this fact.
I think this survey really helped our group get a really good understanding of the level of information people know. Overall it was very low with the exception of the 4th question ““did you know the military does not provide free PTSD medication for returning soldiers” which 74% of people knew this every other question was below 30% for the people that knew. What our group needs to do from here is figure out a way to educate people on the street, that will be one of our next steps.
