Field Study

In my original field of study what I wanted to do was compare the lives of Arcata's poor to the lives of the more successful. When I set out to do my research I didn't know where to start and realized that my study was too broad. Trying to find business owners and executives that where willing to share their income with me was turning out to be impossible so I decided to change my study to one where the subjects were more available and approachable. My attention then turned to the people that will own businesses in the future and chose the youth of Humboldt State to be the subjects of my research. My goal was to find out what college kids spent their money on. When people buy things it puts money into the economy and thats how it grows, because of this it's important to keep a supply of what people want to buy. By looking at what my fellow HSU students purchase we can hopefully project the type of materials we need to supply in order for people to buy. 

How I went about this study was by first randomly selecting 20 students in the sunset dorms. I chose my subjects by using a random number generator to randomly pick 4 unit numbers corresponding to room numbers. Of course some people didn't answer the door when I knocked so I had to generate more then just 20 numbers. Once I made contact with each subject I then asked them the following questions. How much do you spend on gas and transportation, food, clothing, books and school supplies, recreation and housing? Then after finding these proportions I averaged them out to find the average proportion people spend their money on each category listed above.

The final result were gas and transportation 5%, food 19.2%, clothing 9.6%, books or school supplies 12%, recreation 44%, housing 12.5%. After finding these results I realized as college students it makes sense that we would spend most of our money on recreation, fun stuff that gets our mind's school, and that as adults we might not get to spend so much time participating in recreational activities. Then I came to realize what my parents spend most of their money on was me.