A Brief Review on Plannng a Survey

 

Survey Research

A Brief Review on Planning a Survey

Survey Research in social science is a method for gathering information about individuals' attitudes, beliefs, behavior, or attributes. Briefly, Attitudes describe how people feel about something; Beliefs, is what people believe is true or false (there is no implied goodness or badness in beliefs); Behavior is what people do; and Attributes refer to personal or demographic characteristics. The main components of Survey Research include: Statement of Objectives, Questionnaire Design, Pre-testing Sampling, Method of Measurement, and Data Analysis.

Statement of Objectives refers to identifying clearly and concisely the objectives of the survey.

Questionnaire Design. The design of the questionnaire is perhaps one of the most important steps in Survey Research. By applying principles of social exchange theory in order to maximize response to the survey, a questionnaire must appear to be socially useful, be easy to respond to, have a professional look, and be interesting. The following are just a few issues that must be kept in mind when designing a survey:

1. Type of information sought: i.e., is the researcher assessing attitudes, beliefs or behavior?2. Type of question (e.g., open ended vs. force choice). Open ended questions are more demanding.3. Wording of questions: Are the questions too vague, objectionable, too demanding; do they have double meaning?

4. Ordering of questions (most interesting-topic-related questions should go first, attribute-type questions should go last).

Pre-testing: Once the survey is designed, it is often a good idea to pretest it for purposes of refining it (e.g., reword unclear questions).Sampling: Drawing a sample that represents the population is important in obtaining results that can be generalized to the population. Key elements in sampling include:

1. The sample frame defined as the set of people that has a chance to be selected. The probability of each individual in the sample to be chosen, and
2. The details of the sample design (i.e., sample size).

Method of Measurement: Another component in survey research is deciding on the method for implementing the survey. The most common methods include: personal interviews, telephone interviews, mailed questionnaires, or direct observations.

Data Analysis: Once the data is collected and prepared for analysis (data preparation could be a component in itself), then comes the statistical analysis. Deciding which statistical test to use for the type of data collected is important in order to make sense of the data and the findings (e.g., Chi Square is usually used for categorical data). Two popular statistical software packages used for this purpose include SPSS and SAS.