Lab 2 was focused on crowdsourcing and how we can use the process of crowdsourcing to gather and evaluate different data and voices. My group, which consisted of Iris, Sergio, and I, decided to focus our crowdsourcing topic on health insurance. We thought this topic would be fitting since we are focusing on the topic of health in our Multimedia Journalism class throughout the semester.
Before we began our crowdsourcing process, we had to narrow down our searches and decide which demographics we want to look at and focus on. We decided to poll people from Macomb and Oakland County in Southeast Michigan on the topic of health insurance, since we all live in one of the two counties. Although we knew this was a broad topic with lots of different focuses, we decided to keep our questions generic in regards to health insurance.
We used data from the census website on the state of Michigan to find statistics that could help us with our crowdsourcing. According to the website, in regards to health insurance in Michigan, 5.8% of Michigan residents don’t have health insurance, while 14.3% of Michigan residents live with a disability. Sergio suggested that we take this information and turn it into our crowdsourcing idea to see if their was a relationship between the two.
Each of us decided to poll our followers on two different platforms. Iris used Facebook to poll her friends while Sergio and I used Instagram to poll our followers. We asked questions such as “Who do you get your health insurance through”, “Does your health insurance cover disabilities?”, and “Do you know of anyone who has been declined health insurance due to their disability?”.
The question I asked on my Instagram was who my followers get their insurance through: state, federal, employer, self-funded, or uninsured. Some results I found through my followers on Instagram is that 69.2% of my followers who responded got their insurance through their current employer, while 15.4% were insured through the state, and 7.7% were federally insured or self-funded.
Some other results we found were as follows:
It was interesting that more than half of the people polled weren’t sure whether or not their health insurance covered disabilities and 23.1% said their health insurance did not cover disabilities. Given that the state of Michigan has 14.3% of their residents living with disabilities, it is sad to think that they may not be getting the coverage and medical assistance they need. Although we didn’t get many results, which partially may have been because of how broad and sensitive this topic may be, we got some solid results to work with and learn how to crowdsource and the benefits behind the process, while also making a collaborative effort to work as a team.
Alayna Kelty 