A few More Thoughts

I was reflecting on this project and thinking back to our initial meeting where our general impressions of the Farnham area were fairly uninspiring. A quaint country town, sleepy, middle class and fairly affluent overall. Inevitably, there were other aspects that were evident in the Farnham Herald. A mixture of knife attack, robberies, assaults and car crimes reported to illustrate that normal life continues behind the "nice" image. The property pages also give a good indication of the social mix with glossy picture of many £million plus houses available.

The idea to scratch a little below the surface and try to look at the attitudes and beliefs of the local people was an exciting way to respond to our first impressions. As a scientific experiment i am sure that there was much more we could do to test our hypohesis - more speciffic questions, ensuring the sample involved no bias, more interviews at different times of the day and difernt locations in the town etc. However, the objective of the project was not to prove the results of the research but to show that we had used our inital research to help us to come up with a creative and interesting angle and carried it through.

I feel that the results we achieved had a positive effect on the group, in that on the surface, the students are well acceped in the local community - something we had not felt at the outset. Furthermore ,there did not appear to be any obvious evidence of a racial nature, more a communication and confidence matter.