Field Research In Marken

These are all pictures of Marken, where we did our tourism questionnaires in the Netherlands.
Marken actually used to be an island, until a causeway was built connecting it to the mainland.





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It's snowing in Haarlem again! Looking out the window, it's been going on and off all day. A few days ago we had a thunderstorm at 4am in the morning, which woke everybody up. It looks like we've been getting some ugly weather out from the North Sea...

So last week! The face-to-face questionnaires in Marken were a success, although to be honest, it was a bit of a challenge for me. We decided as a group that to get the best results from the locals in Marken, the questionnaires should be in Dutch. Right. So this meant that our group of 6 split up into pairs of 2, with every pair having at least one native Dutch speaker. We went to tourism businesses in Marken, as well as asking people in the street. Since it was a wet and windy day both days we were there, we decided that the best way to get as many responses as possible was to go door to door.

So I tagged along with my partner, and she introduced us and our project every time, and asked the locals if they would like to participate in our research. I felt like I was there for moral support more than anything, as I couldn't really help administer the questionnaires haha. But...I've picked up some more handy phrases, which I repeated almost the whole time we were in Marken: "Goedemiddag, ik kom uit Canada, ik spreek engels..." (good afternoon, I'm from Canada, I speak English...)

After our field research in Marken, we decided that it would be useful to create online questionaires to send to the tourism businesses that we weren't able to contact. For those people at Malaspina: surveymonkey saved the day! I ended up transcribing our Dutch questionnaires into surveymonkey, and later sent it off to the tourism businesses. If you'd like a look at this survey, here's the link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=rTC_2bu1aOZ1ssFIQLWTShNQ_3d_3d

Please don't actually fill in this survey though, because it will skew our results :)

A friend took pictures of Marken herself while we were there, if I can get the pictures then I'll post them here.