1. To what extent do people move to Shanghai for the same reasons?

2. Geographers and other scientists like to look for trends in data.

3. One of the easiest ways for people to spot trends is to graph your data.

4. What this means is that you will have to organize your questionnaires in a way that allows you to make categories.

5. Once you have categories, you can compare each category on a graph.

6. For example, if you make a survey to find out how many people like cookies, you may give a questionnaire that asks the question: Do you like cookies?

7. If you ask 50 people, then you answers may look something like this: 30 people = yes 20 people = no

8. If you graph this, it may look like this: Not very interesting yet right?

9. But what if we separate the people in our survey into categories to compare with? One easy way to separate into categories is by age.

10. Once we make categories, we can then look for trends or interesting details.

11. Then our chart may look something like this: Hmmm, now this is getting interesting…..

12. We can start to compare people from different ages and see some trends.

13. What trends can you start to see here?

14. So, to make our survey more interesting, we can divide the people who answer our questions into categories.

15. Maybe we can focus our question as: To what extent do people move to Shanghai for the same reasons? We can also make a new question to try to answer.

16. If we do this, how can we put ‘people’ into categories? Age, gender, economic status, Nationality etc……

17. We don’t want to have too many categories, because that will get too complicated. To keep it simple, we can choose just a few categories to represent.

18. Age Gender Nationality

19. What this means is that you will have to have room in your survey to find out these details form people. Some people may not want to tell you their age. Can you think of a way around this?