Research Memo

Megan Byard

Ms. McKoy

English II

21 February 2013

Dealing Lupus: Fighting an autoimmune disease

Hypothesis: How many people know about Lupus? Does anyone even know what Lupus is? I believe that not many people know about Lupus at all. I believe teenagers, especially, don’t know anything about Lupus. So how many people really know about Lupus and how can we raise awareness about it?

Context: My targeted audience was people in their early teens to about their mid-twenties. I chose these respondents to prove my hypothesis and how not many younger people know about Lupus. I discovered in my pilot testing that my hypothesis was correct. My results are reliable and valid. I know this because when people where taking the survey, they were not asking other people questions about what Lupus was. No my survey was not skewed or biased.

Results:

Age	14-19 (22 participants)	20-25 (0 participants)	26-30 (2 participants)	31-36 (0 participants)	37+ (1 participant)
Gender	Male (3 participants)	Female (22 participants)
Race	Caucasian (18 participants)	African American (2 participants)	Asian (1 participant)	Hispanic (3 participants)	Other (1 participant)
Do you know what Lupus is?	Yes (4 participants)	No (13 participants)	Somewhat (8 participants)
What is it?	Disease (4 participants)	I thought it was a kind of depression or mental disease that also affects the body. (1 participant)	A disease that affects the immune system and damages tissue. (1 participant)	Autoimmune disease. (2 participants)
Do you, or someone you know, have Lupus?	Yes (7 participants)	No (10 participants)	I’m not sure (8 participants)
If so, who?	Friend (2 participants)	Man from church (1 participant)	Client (1 participant)	Mother (2 participants)	Themselves (1 participant)
How were they affected?	Death (2 participants)	In-and-out of the hospital (1 participant)	Always cold, purple hands (1 participant)	Rash and body weakness (1 participant)	N/A (1 participant)
How important do you think Lupus is on a scale of 1-10?	1 (1)                        2 (0)	3  (0)                              4 (1)	5  (6)                                6 (2)	7   (5)                              8 (3)	9  (1)                            10 (6)
Who do you think is more likely to have Lupus?	Men (4 participants)	Women (21 participants)

 

Conclusion: When I was preforming my survey and placing the results into the chart above, I learned that my hypothesis was indeed correct! I learned that 12/25 participants know or have some minimal idea of what Lupus is and how people who have it are affected. 13/25 people, which is obviously more than 12/25 people, is the amount of participants that have no clue what lupus is and they were all in the 14-19 age range.