"Success" Survey discussion

By daniel chen

In today's world, people see success in different ways, depending on the area. We wanted to find out what factors people think make a student successful, so we did an online survey. Our goal is to understand what the public thinks about success, helping us make educated guesses about what people value.

We used a Google Form for an online survey and differentiated the respondents according to respondent gender, age, and ask questions: “What three factors do you think a student needs to have to become successful? 你覺得一個成功的學生要具備哪三個條件?” The survey was in both Chinese and English for Taiwan's Chinese-speaking population. We shared it on platforms like Instagram, Line, and Discord. The responses were sorted into categories: social relationships, physical appearance, personal qualities, actions, wealth, abilities, personal background, and enjoyment.

98 responses were collected from 33 respondents. In total, there were 17 female respondents and 16 male respondents. Out of all the respondents, 25 were students, and 8 were at working age. The responses were categorized as follows: 6 were in the social relationships category, 2 in physical appearance, 8 in actions, 1 in personal background, 3 in enjoyment, 51 in personal qualities, 2 in wealth, 24 in abilities, and the last one was uncategorized. More details are shown in the table below.

According to the survey the society thinks that the most important traits of being successful is “Personal qualities”(43) follow by “Abilities”(18), “Mindset” (11), “Action”(8), “Talent”(6), “Social relationships”(4), “Personal background”(3), “Enjoyment”(3), “Wealth”(2), “Physical appearance”(2).The result was surprising because it was expected that money and appearance would be the most important factors in measuring success.The researcher thinks that the reason is because everyone has different meaning of “success”. The researcher guess the reason that “Personal qualities” and “Mindset” are important because they shape how we handle problems and work with others, and the reason that “abilities” is important because if you have more “abilities” you can do more things than others.

In Taiwan, most people think personal qualities and abilities are key to success. There are gender differences, especially in social relationships. However, due to the small sample size and limitations of an online survey, these findings may not accurately represent reality. In order to get a more accurate picture of this issue, the researcher would need to get more amount of data.