Survey Results: Badges

Thanks to everyone who responded to my survey.  This post will cover questions about the badge program.  A previous posts listed people's comments about badges. 

What Awards Did Troops Earn?

GSUSA divides today's program into four "pillars"--STEM, Outdoors, Life Skills and Business/Entrepreneurship.  Life Skills is a catch-all for anything that does not fit the other categories.  I asked what troops at various levels earned last year.  

Your Turn to Talk: Comments from Survey on GSUSA Programming

 At the end of my survey on GSUSA programming, I had a "say whatever you want" item.  I complied posts with the comments about Journeys/TAPs and Badges.  This post covers the other comments--both those that didn't fit into the earlier posts and those which had not been posted when I wrote the previous posts.  Grab a snack or a drink and scroll away.  See something that rankles you or that you think is profound?  Discuss here in the comments or on the Facebook group where you found this link.  

Survey Results: What I Ordered and What I Got

This post is to report the results of a survey I did of members of Facebook Girl Scout Leader groups.  My questions were designed to elicit opinions about the Girl Scout program as GSUSA has designed it and promulgates it at this time.  

Who Responded

To determine how much weight to give to the results of any survey it is useful to know who is responding.  80% of those who responded to my survey were troop leaders, 18% were co-leaders, 26% were other Girl Scout volunteers. 2% were council staff and 52.2% were parents of a Girl Scout.  222 people responded to this question.

Girl Scout Leaders: Your Turn to Talk about Badges

 I recently asked a bunch of members of Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders to respond to a lengthy survey on Girl Scout Programming.  The final question was a free space for them to say whatever they wanted to say.  Since these folks were nice enough to participate, I think giving their comments space on my blog is important.  The comments I am putting on this post all deal with badges.  I have edited them for clarity, punctuation, and to make the post more readable, but the thoughts belong to those who responded to the survey, not to me.  Feel free to add your comment in the comments section below.

Survey Results: Ambassador Badges

Were you wondering if I was ever going to get to Ambassadors?  For those who are not following along, this is the fourth in a series of posts recounting the results of a survey about Girl Scouts' older girl program.  Here are the other posts:  

• General responses about the program
• Cadette Badges
• Senior Badges

This post will cover the responses about Ambassador badges.  I'll put my usual disclaimer in here:  I'm not a professional survey designer and the Facebook groups I poll are almost certainly not a random sampling of Girl Scouts or Girl Scout leaders.  I don't claim these results would hold up if a professional wrote a randomly delivered survey. I just noticed that the Think Like a Journeys were left off my award list, so I don't know how popular they are with this age group. Do you? 

Survey Results: Senior Badges

 

This is the third post I've written to share the results of my survey on the older girl program in Girl Scouts.  You can read general impressions here, and opinions about Cadette badges here. 

I asked respondents to review the list of awards available to Seniors and to give them one of these ratings:

• Haven't done it and don't want to
• Did it, liked it
• Did it, meh
• Did it, didn't like it
• Haven't done it but want to
• Didn't know it existed.

I had 248 overall responses to the survey and each badge got about 90 votes, so evidently most people who responded had not led Seniors or been one under the current program.  

I went through the responses looking for outliers---those badges which got responses  that stood out from the others.  

Survey Results: Cadette Badges

 The numbers on this post came from a survey I conducted by posting a link on some Facebook pages for Girl Scout leaders.  For the record, I have had daughters in the older girl program, but I've never led Cadettes, Seniors or Amabassadors.  

Out of 235 responses, 4.3% said they hadn't been a Cadette in the current program, nor led them.  10.6% said their troop earned less than three Cadette badges per year.  32.3% said they earned 3-5 badges per year and 52.8% earned more than five per year.  

For each Cadette badge, I asked that it be rated as either 

• Haven't done it and don't want to
• Did it, loved it
• Did it, meh
• Did it, didn't like it
• Haven't done it but want to
• Didn't know it existed.

The Older Girl Program: Survey Results

 After publishing my posts regarding surveys I did about the Daisy and Brownie programs, some people asked "What about the older girls?" thinking that as often happens in Girl Scouts, the older girls were left out.  Well, it took a while but I finally did an older girl survey and here are the results.

Who Responded? 

Of the 240 responses I got, 13 were from current Girl Scouts.  207 were from current leaders of older girls. 60 were from adults who were Girl Scouts past Juniors.  114 were parents of current or former older Girl Scouts.  

About 68% of people picked one of my reasons why they or their girls are still in Girl Scouts.  The others 32% had a variety of answers.  The choices I gave were:

• Its what they do with that group of friends (13.9%)
• The outdoor activities (19%)
• To work on the Gold for college/career prep (8.7%)
• It's fun (32%)
• Travel (3.9%)

What Girl Scout Leaders Think of the Brownie Program?

 This is the second post in a series that involves surveying members of Girl Scout Facebook groups about their opinons of the current program. You can read about the Daisy program here.  

Who Replied?

With any survey, knowing who responded is important.  My gut feeling, based on replies to other surveys I've done and responses to posts on those Facebook groups was that people who responded tended to be more experienced than most leaders, and probably had a bigger committment to the program than most leaders.  

What Do Girl Scout Leaders Think of the Daisy Program

 

One part of Girl Scouts that has changed a lot in the last 15 years is Daisies.  Originally it was a one year program focused on learning the Girl Scout Law.  The only "badges" were the petals and since it was often October or November before troops were up and running, they were really enough for the year.  

When my sixteen year old was in kindergarten, the current program started and Daisies became a two  year program.  The awards expanded to include the leaves and the three original Journeys (actually one was added per year for three years so my daughter could have only earned two).

A few years later GSUSA went though a couple of years of "girls' choice" badges and added Buddy Camper and Outdoor Art to the Daisy portfolio.  Then they substantially expanded badge choices at all levels focusing on STEM, and Daisies got even more badges, an Outdoor Journey and three STEM Journeys.  

I was curious what badges and Journeys Daisies work on, how they do them and what they think of them.  Since surveying Daisies is hard, I surveyed leaders who are members of various Facebook groups for Girl Scout leaders and at the time I started the post, I had 168 responses.  While I did not gather data about the leaders, in past experience with surveying members of these groups, I have found that those who reply tend to be older than the average Girl Scout leader and tend to have been leading longer than most.  Whether that is true of the respondents to this survey I do  not know.