Helena Meyer-Knapp

Surveys: In all three countries I collected responses to over 250 surveys. The collection process was not based on formal sampling techniques, thus the quantitative analysis indicates the values and attitudes of those particular people not the population as a whole.

Surveys reached students at publicly funded and at privately funded institutions and at both high schools and colleges. The students were given nearly identical surveys about their tours, always presented in their own language with the open ended answers translated by native speakers of Korea and Japanese. The questions relating to preparations, to activities while away and to participation by others were in multiple-choice format. Students were free to identify their destinations in any terms they chose and at the end of the survey they were given three spaces for open-ended comments on what they learned.  For Americans there turned out to be a broad category that, rather than being place specific travel was activity specific and represented the many ways US schools send students out to perform or compete – athletics, music, theater, model UN, Y camp etc. I created a second data entry system to code and interpret this kind of American travel experience.

Most students were surveyed in the Kansai region in central Japan, and they were mostly life-long residents of central Japan. A few were based in Kyushu, and a very small number were in Tokyo. In the United States, the students were all in Washington State when surveyed. However, since American families move quite frequently and students often travel out of state for college, these respondents represented high school traditions in various parts of the country, the west coast predominating. In all three countries, students attended both public and private high schools and colleges and some were students whose particular focus was to be studying the other country – Japan/Japanese language in the US and the United States/English language in Japan, English in Korea. The surveys were administered in the classroom in the presence of the teacher. I administered most surveys myself and was given complete freedom to introduce the survey process as I chose. Teachers did not see the answers given by their students, and there is no reason to believe that the fact they were in their teacher’s presence had any particular influence on the ways students responded.

For the open-ended questions about three things they learned on their trips I coded answers in clusters: war/peace, behavioral norms (friendship, rules, independence), local features (history, culture, language and food). Items that did not fit the clustered categories I listed in the student’s own words. Separately I did a complete transcription of all US student comments, and of all parts of those surveys among the Japanese students where there was some reference to war and/or peace

In Japan, the surveys asked only about one particular kind of tour, the shugaku ryoko, which is a whole-class activity. The U.S. sees relatively few such trips but many others group trips are organized for bands and sports teams etc. so those trips were specifically included. Japanese families travel with their teenagers, but schools dominate trips to Hiroshima etc. Korean student travel patterns resemble the Japanese more closely. The survey in Korea followed the Japanese model, focusing entirely on school related travel, though it differed, in that this particular survey was bi-lingual which encouraged some students to answer in English. The Japanese and Korean surveys were translated by students in my classes who are native speakers in those two languages.

The complete data files are available for anyone who has a genuine use for them. The quantitative findings offer almost nothing in the way of direct connections between a specific activity and a specific response. One of the strongest findings, the power of visits to Okinawa on Japanese student feelings about the cruelty of war, results from student comments. The numerical work that is most revealing shows where one or another country is an outlier in frequencies. Those are described in the page labeled Schools Research – Introduction.

I have collated Frequencies for Japan, USA, Korea in a combined file. These are student responses to the questions about whether they went on trips, which kinds of topics they mentioned in their open-ended questions and  the various questions about where the decision-making rested about the pragmatic features of each trip — hotels, costs, schedule etc.

The files below show the original questionnaires and samples of data coding from each country. On the sample data page for Japan you will also find the coding numbers which correspond to the responses for that particular survey. The same model used in all three questionnaires, though the destinations listed varied from survey to survey. The actual questions also differ slightly from survey to survey, but the overall structure of three surveys is identical. The responses to questions on the topics students studied before they went on trips proved too obviously unreliable to use.

US questionnaire

sample US Data (raw)

Japan questionnaire

sample Japanese data (raw)

Korea questionnaire

sample korean data (raw)

One more generic statement about numbers and percentages that you see throughout this site. Japanese students all went on field trips and they filled in the surveys very completely. American students all filled in the surveys but only half of them went on field trips in groups. Korean students all went on field trips but many more of them left many more questions blank and you will find that rather large numbers of the Korean students stated they could not remember where they even went.