I learned a lot from my first Google poll. Ultimately, I got the idea for this survey from being near Occupy Wall Street one day last week out of curiosity. After getting positive responses on Facebook to the photo album I posted about the occupation, I thought that it would be interesting to see a cross section of people who attended, or are simply interested.

As I am genuinely interested in gauging support for Occupy Wall Street, I soon realized in my questions that it is difficult to pose a question as being unbiased. Using words like “support” or “movement” seemed to be too loaded to me; others, like “agree” or “disagree” are less filled with connotation.

Also, I learned a lot about which questions to leave as multiple choice and which to leave open ended. If I narrow the scope of a question, I run the risk of impressing my own ideas and knowledge of the subject upon the interviewee. However, if I leave too many of them open to the person taking the poll, it lacks focus and does not establish any sort of trends.

The social media aspect of my poll worked well; being as #occupywallstreet is a very popular trend on Twitter, I was able to draw in interviewees who weren’t my immediate peers. Facebook, by nature, attracted less attention.