College Credit Card Debt
Methodology

We constructed a survey that consisted of questions pertaining to students and their credit card usages. We made 21 survey questions to ask about the sample’s general information, such as age, gender, ethnicity, living arrangement, financial assistance, if they own credit cards or not, credit card usages, and so forth. Those survey questions were constructed to find out more information about students’ credit cards habits. We used data from our survey to find out about the main five factors that influence credit spending.

Our research questions were based on the five factors we decided would guide our questionnaire. The five factors were grade level, gender, card payment; if one pays in full every month or if they pay only the minimum. Our questions were whether these factors affected students’ credit card debt. We developed the survey to strategically find as much information as we could on each of the five factors, without making the survey too long. Some of our findings, like our regression chart, were not based on strategic development of the survey, but were pieced together from different sections of the survey.

Our data contributed to our estimations by both confirming prior beliefs, and surprising us. We estimated that freshmen would owe the most out of the four grade levels we sampled. However, the data showed us that seniors had the highest average amount owed. Another surprise was that females, at San Marcos State, owe on average less than the males we surveyed. One of our most odd findings was that students that own a Master Card were predicted to owe more than those that own a Visa, Discovery Card, or American Express. We think this is due to the fact Master Card is widely accepted, possibly higher spending limits, and possibly some psychological factors that maybe people that own a Master Card, feel they are a master shopper, so they spend like crazy.

Our survey focused primarily on students at CSUSM. We decided every group member should survey at least fifteen students each, because we wanted about one hundred completed surveys. We thought stratified random sampling would be the best option to get the results we needed. We collected our data at several buildings including Academic Hall, Kellogg library, dome, and University Hall. After completing the surveys we met up to compile the data into an Excel spreadsheet.

To summarize, we did a random stratified survey to collect data on students’ credit card habits and general information on the students’ life. The general information such as age, gender, grade level, living status, financial assistance, how much they owe to credit card companies, and so forth, was the foundation to all of our findings.

The limitations to our survey were first, we did not have enough freshmen and sophomores. We had a total of three freshmen surveyed, and only nine sophomores. In contrast we had a total of fifty-eight juniors surveyed. If we had more freshmen and sophomores in our sample population, we might have had different findings, especially in the average amount owed by grade level. Also some of the students we surveyed did not own a credit card. This number was relatively small, but if we had first screened our sample to find out if they had a credit first, we would not have had to omit some of our data from our findings. Lastly, we feel the sample size was slightly too small to give us enough proof to back up our conclusions.

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College Credit Card Debt Methodology

College Credit Card Debt
Methodology