On January 16, my group and I walked to Washington Square park with a 5 question yes or no survey in hand. The survey contained 5 facts on veterans and the goal of the survey was to find out what people in society actually knew about veterans and how they are treated when they are returned home. Our results were quite interesting.
Our first question we asked was “Did you know 1 out of 4 homeless people are veterans”. About 21% of people did know this fact, and 79% didn’t. The next question we asked if they knew was “Every 65 seconds a vet commits suicide”. 5% of people we asked knew this and 95% didn’t. Not only did this surprise us, it made us think about how little people were educated about this. The next fact asked was, “Did you know the military does not provide free PTSD medicine”. About 32% of people knew this and 68% didn’t. This also made us stop and think. It’s outrageous how our government funds the military with billions of dollars yet can’t help veterans when they return form helping. Next we asked, “Did you know 20% of veterans have PTSD”. 74% of people did know this and 26% didn’t. This question was the most well known among everyone we asked. Our last question was “Did you know veterans account for 20% of suicides”. This was our most surprising and interesting question we asked. 100% of the people we asked did not know this fact. We asked around 25 people, and none of them knew about this fact.
After conducting this survey, we learned a lot about what people actually knew about our topic. The two questions with the highest percentage of “didn’t know” were the only two questions concerning suicide. The two questions with the lowest percentage of “didn’t know” were questions concerning PTSD. This shows us that a lot of people have a at least some knowledge about PTSD, but don’t know how it ultimately affects people. People knew that veterans had these issues, but they didn’t know that they caused so many of them to kill themselves. We hope that our survey made some people realize what a huge problem this is in our society. Overall, this was a great experience for us. We learned a lot about the knowledge of other people, and even what it is like conduct a survey in general. We will use the information we learned to help us with our workshop and figure out in the future how to educate those we want to teach.
