For my survey, I asked students various questions to determine their experience(s) with graffiti. I wanted to know the student's gender and age, if they have ever seen graffiti, if they think graffiti is art, why or why not, if they think graffiti has value, why or why not, how graffiti makes them feel, if graffiti is a justifiable crime, and -based on Webster's definition of art- if their thoughts about graffiti have changed.
I received nineteen responses; however, there must be an error in the first question about gender because it says that 11 participants are female while 2 are male. I couldn't figure out what the problem was, but the rest of the questions recorded nineteen responses. Based on the second question, the range for age of participants is 20 to 33. The mode for this range is 20, the median is 21, and the mean is 21.4. Of the 19 participants, all said they had seen graffiti. Sixteen answered that they think graffiti is art, while 3 did not. Some of the responses answering why or why not to the previous stated "Because it is beautiful, just sometimes in inappropriate places," "It is an expression of one's thoughts, that is art in my opinion," and "Because it is something someone took time to work on just like a piece of art. It takes talent, time, and creativity as well...." To the question of if graffiti has value or not, 14 said it does have value, while 6 say it does not. To answer why or why not to the previous question, some wrote "Because it is art," "Not when curse words are used," "I think that it can, but it generally does not in the way that it is used." When asked how graffiti made them feel, the respondents could choose more than one "check box" listing an emotion: Inspired (5), Happy (3), Indignant (0), Creative (9), Thoughtful (3), Sad (0), Impressed (3), Indifferent (4), None of the above (6). Of the 19 respondents, two think graffiti is a justifiable crime, three do not think the crime is justified, while fourteen think that it depends. When presented with the definition of art from Webster's New World Dictionary (2nd College Edition) and the belief held by many people that art is any such thing that produces any sort of emotion in a person, 17 said these two ideas did not change their thoughts about graffiti while 2 say they did.
As I'm interested in graffiti, I just wanted to see some of my peers' thoughts on the matter. This could certainly be a gender or generational study, if the pool of participants was a bit larger. I figured that most people would have seen graffiti, but what really surprised me was how many people think that it's art. I expected most of the participants to say that it isn't art. For the various responses for why or why not to the question of if graffiti is art or not, I was surprised by some of the reasons, as well. Most of the participants said that graffiti gave them positive emotions or those of indifference or none of those listed. I was surprised that no one chose a negative emotion, like sad or indignant. I designed this survey to give qualitative as well as quantitative results. As this is meant to be a study on perceptions (of graffiti), I thought the responses generally matched what I was asking for. From the results, I would say that most of the participants believe graffiti is art, but that it can definitely be hateful in nature. The fact that most respondents said that "It depends" when graffiti is a justifiable crime is very interesting to me. I would say that this connects to the fact that most of the participants believe graffiti is art, but not when it's profane or offensive.
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