Over the last week, I've been researching as much as I can into what issues face motorcyclists today. With no obvious starting point, I set about googling random phrases, questions and statistics to see if anything could set me off down the long, tedious design path we call an honours project.
At first, it was quite hard to pull all the information together. I had random statistics on motorcycle death (eye-opening but not entirely useful) and how many people owned motorbikes, etc., but what I seemed to lack were opinions from real bikers. Everything was pulled from online, collated by statisticians and cracked into an excel spreadsheet for other statisticians to ogle over.
What I needed were real opinions and real stories from people within the biking community.
I thought the most efficient and effective way of doing this was to create a survey, so I did. I came up with seven questions ranging from 'How long have you been riding for?' through to 'If you've had any accidents - what were they?' and I sent them off to a few of my friends. What I hoped was that once someone had completed the survey, they would send it off to a few other friends to complete, then they would send it on again and so on, eventually leading to a right amount of opinions from people with experience.
In short - that didn't work. Over the space of two days, I got a disappointing 32 results. Only 32 people had given their opinions and quite a few of those decided to give completely daft 'joke' answers that didn't help my research in any way. At this point, I was starting to lose hope. The survey didn't tell me anything I didn't already know and was mostly pointless.
Right as I was about to scrap it I thought to myself, 'I've got nothing to lose here' and fired it into some relatively small facebook biker groups. Well, thank god for the internet - in the space of a few short hours I managed to get an additional 334 responses, every one of them serious and comprehensive answers to all my questions. There were a few people who fired abuse at me over Facebook - some calling me fake and others saying my survey was a waste of time, but oh well.
All I've got left to do with the survey is the tough bit. Three hundred sixty-five total responses, each survey containing seven different questions equals 2,555 total answers to read through, sort and try to come to some sort of conclusion for the survey. By quickly glancing down the responses, there is one conclusion I can draw; motorbiking is dangerous. 68% of respondents reported that they'd been in a crash at some point while riding a motorbike, most of the time with a car, and usually resulting in pretty serious injury.
Why I'm into this mode of transport, I don't know, but if I'm still as into it after this project, it must be true love (sad).
In my next blog, I'll write about the different responses I gathered from the survey, each fact and figure and what conclusions I can draw from it all. Stay tuned; it's going to be a gripping one...
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Cover Photo Image:
Higgins, R. (2017) Confused. Available at: https://pixabay.com/photos/confused-hands-up-unsure-perplexed-2681507/ (Accessed:15/10/2019).
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