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In our study we found results that coincided with our research and hypotheses.
We found that demographics did not have as big of an effect on our study as we had thought it might. The majority of our class is juniors and sophomores, therefore we did not have enough information to really prove or disprove our hypothesis that juniors and seniors use the library databases more than sophomores and freshmen do. The age range was pretty consistent in the survey, and the questions about what college the survey takers were in probably should've been a little more specific because we have no way of finding out which people from which college said what. Most students also fell within the 3.0-4.0 GPA range, which gave us a bit of data with which to answer hypothesis 3 (that students with a higher GPA are more likely to use the library) and actually helped to almost disprove it.
In response to our free form question, "Overall, what does most of your research pertain to and how serious do you take it?", most people said that they do research to write papers, do projects, business/profession/ major related searches and general class material research. Most people said that they take research very seriously and that they value the credibility of the information because they want the grade they get on their work to be a good one.
Our findings were pretty consistent with the findings of others in the past. Students say that they know how to use the library databases and that credibility of sources is important to them but they also say that it is too time consuming to look through them in that manner. Most people said that when they research for a class that they will use both the library database and Google, however, when we looked at the statistics for Google versus the library database, an overwhelming majority said that they use Google over the library. Our results were pretty consistent throughout and they were pretty much what we expected. Some students may have given contradicting answers but we believe that is because of the time issue- yes, they believe credibility of sources is important but if it takes too much time, they choose to lose the credibility and take the "shortcut".
The results that we found in the survey generalize, to some extent, because we were given only a certain amount of people to conduct it. We also found that our demographic was rather homogenous (similar GPAs, only some of the 8 colleges, majority in 2 class years, and same age) which definitely affected what we could and could not find out. Had we a larger group, we probably would have had a better idea of what research methods DePaul University as a whole might use (though we think it would be similar to this).