Research Memo

Hypothesis:

Parkour is about getting someplace using jumps, vault and turning obstacles into opportunities. Parkour is a sport clouded with an air of danger. Many people believe it is dangerous and possibly fatal to tracer [people who participate in parkour]. What I hope to find out is what type of people does this adrenaline laced sport attracts and why?

Context:

I discovered out that many people believe that parkour is overly dangerous. They also believe it has a high injury rate. The survey targeted young males as respondents. The reason behind this is that I looked for people that seemed to be informed about what parkour was.   I should have allowed more people to the survey and add more demographic questions.  During the second round I put more demographic questions and added more people to my target “audience”. The reason behind this was that I wanted to detect more trends among the questions and I wanted more diversity in my response.

Questions /Respondents	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8		9
Have you heard of parkour before now?	Yes	no	yes	Yes	yes	yes	yes	yes		yes
On a Scale of 1-10 how dangerous is parkour	9	10	7	5	6	10	10	10		8
Circle all that apply You do parkour You know someone who does parkour You have heard of parkour	3	1,2,3	2,3	3	2	1,2,3	1,2,3	2,3		2,3
Parkour should be regulated more	disagree	agree	agree	disagree	disagree	Agree	agree	disagree		disagree
Parkour is a form of self-expression	true	false	true	true	true	true	true	true		True
Free running and parkour are the same thing	false	True	false	false	false	false	false	true		False
Parkour is for little kids	agree	Agree	disagree	agree	disagree	disagree	disagree		disagree		disagree
Parkour is a growing fad in the urban communities	agree	agree	agree	disagree	agree	agree	agree	agree		agree
Parkour is deadly to participants	disagree	agree	agree	agree	agree	agree	agree	agree		agree

Data Analysis:

The data I collect can be seen on the chart above. The first ten I did I noticed some trend. The first trend was that all but one of the respondents said that they believe that parkour is deadly to tracers. The interpretation of this trend is that the general public over all believes it to be a extremely dangerous to all the people who participate. On the danger scale you see that most gave it a high number ( 8 or above) on the danger scale ,this adds to the idea that it is a dangerous sport. For the open ended response I saw  they were answered similarly but most having to with teens or young people, along with one ninja.

Conclusion:

The conclusion is that the public opinion is that parkour is dangerous. They believe that young people and peoples whose trade requires it do this. The survey supported my hypothesis about the general publics view about parkour with the exclusion of one response  caught me off guard for the question who parkour attracts as a participant “ninjas”.