Professional Documents
Culture Documents
o A survey is a way of collecting information that you hope represents the views of
the whole community or group in which you are interested.
o Is a data-gathering technique that makes you obtain facts or information about the
subject or object of your research through the data-gathering instruments of
interview or questionnaire.
T H E R E AR E T H R E E M AI N W AY S O F G O I N G AB O U T T H I S :
When carrying out a survey, a researcher will initially need to establish a certain
understanding as to the nature and purpose of the study. Is it to be a poll of people’s
behavior, attitudes or opinions? Or is it an analytical study, examining correlation (the
relationship) between sets of data? What do you hope to learn from the process? What
will happen to the results? Who will be asked, what will they be asked and how will
they be asked? Being clear about the aims of the survey will help to establish the
target population, which may comprise of individuals, specific groups or units (e.g.
clinics or wards). After an overall aim for the study has been established, it may be
useful to propose more precise goals. For example, if the overall aim of a survey is to
establish service users’ opinions of the care they receive, more precise goals of
enquiry could include particular objectives of the service, such as quality of care.
Identify the ‘sample frame’ – before choosing a sample from the overall population,
it is necessary to produce a sample frame, a list of all those within the population of
interest from which a sample can be selected.
Systematic sampling – from a list of names you may decide that every nth
person or individuals whose names begin with specified alphabetical letters will
be selected for inclusion in the sample, until the sample size required has been
attained. Care should be taken with this method because, due to the way the
sample frame is produced, an unrepresentative sample can be chosen. A periodic
cycle may exist in the list that could bias the sample.
Cluster sampling – is applied when a population naturally falls into groups. For
example, in a school, classes can be used as the unit to be randomized, rather
than individual schoolchildren.
Snowball sampling – occurs when the researcher initially contacts a small group
of people and then uses these individuals to make contact with others from the
population of interest. This may be employed if an accessible sampling frame is
lacking or because the population is changeable. Again, such an approach is
problematic in terms of representativeness.
Identify how large the sample needs to be – a sample only constitutes a proportion of
the real population. Hence, results from the sample that are generalized to the overall
population are at risk of inaccuracy; the choice of an alternative sample could give
different responses, generating different results. Such inaccuracies can be reduced
through the use of random sampling and careful selection of the sample size. When
deciding on a sample size, researchers need to consider various aspects of their
research, including:
Open-ended: Designed to prompt the respondent to provide you with more than
just one- or two-word responses. These are often "how" or "why" questions.
For example: "Why is it important to use condoms?" These questions are used when
you want to find out what leads people to specific behaviors, what their attitudes are
towards different things, or how much they know about a given topic; they provide good
anecdotal evidence. The drawback to using open-ended questions is that it's hard to
compile their results.
For example: "Do you use condoms?" These are used when the information you need
is fairly clear-cut, i.e., if you need to know whether people use a particular service or
have ever heard of a specific local resource.
Multiple choice: Allow the respondent to select one answer from a few possible
choices.
For example: "When I have sex, I use condoms... a) every time, b) most times, c)
sometimes, d) rarely, e) never." These allow you to find out more detailed information
than closed-ended questions, and the results can be compiled more easily than open-
ended questions.
Likert scale: Each respondent is asked to rate items on a response scale. For
instance, they could rate each item on a 1-to-5 response scale where:
1 = strongly disagree
2 = disagree
3 = undecided
4 = agree
5 = strongly agree
If you want to weed out neutral and undecided responses you can use an even-
numbered scale with no middle "neutral" or "undecided" choice. In this situation, the
respondent is forced to decide whether he or she leans more towards the "agree" or
"disagree" end of the scale for each item. The final score for the respondent on the
scale might be the sum of his or her ratings for all of the items.
Example: Using the Likert scale
Here are a few sample survey questions in Likert scale format, done without a neutral
category:
Please check the answer indicating your reaction to the questions listed below.
Strongly Disagree
Disagree
Agree
Strongly Agree
Violent crime is a significant problem in my neighborhood
The police have done enough to prevent crime in my neighborhood.
If a citizen watch program were implemented in my neighborhood, I would
participate in it.
I would be supportive of organized activities for youth in my neighborhood.
It is then necessary to decide how those selected will be contacted; by letter, by phone
or in person. Mailed or telephone surveys tend to be less expensive because they do
not require the time and cost of an experienced, qualified interviewer. However, a
better response rate is likely to emerge from face to face interviews, compared to
telephone and mail surveys, and from telephone surveys compared to mailed one. If
it is mailed, ensure that clear instructions are provided on the survey and make sure
it is well presented and uncluttered.
Constructing a Survey
1. Martha wants to construct a survey that shows which sports students at her
school like to play the most.
a) List the goal of the survey.
The goal of the survey is to find the answer to the question: “Which sports do
students at Martha’s school like to play the most?”
b) What population sample should she interview?
A sample of the population would include a random sample of the student population
in Martha’s school. A good strategy would be to randomly select students (using dice
or a random number generator) as they walk into an all-school assembly.
c) How should she administer the survey?
Face-to-face interviews are a good choice in this case. Interviews will be easy to
conduct since the survey consists of only one question which can be quickly
answered and recorded, and asking the question face to face will help eliminate non-
response bias.
d) Create a data collection sheet that she can use to record her results.
In order to collect the data to this simple survey Martha can design a data collection
sheet such as the one below:
Sport Tally
baseball
basketball
football
soccer
volleyball
swimming
This is a good, simple data collection sheet because:
Plenty of space is left for the tally marks.
Only one question is being asked.
Many possibilities are included, but space is left at the bottom in case
students give answers that Martha didn’t think of.
The answer from each interviewee can be quickly collected and then the data
collector can move on to the next person.
Once the data has been collected, suitable graphs can be made to display the
results.
[Figure2]
[Figure1]
b. Make a pie chart of the collected information, showing the percentage of students in
each category.
To make a pie chart, we find the percentage of the students in each category by dividing
the number of students in each category as in part a. The central angle of each slice of
the pie is found by multiplying the percentage of students in each category by 360
degrees (the total number of degrees in a circle). To draw a pie-chart by hand, you can
use a protractor to measure the central angles that you find for each category.
EXPERIMENT
“An experiment is a scientific method of collecting data whereby you give the subjects
a sort of treatment or condition then evaluate the results to find out the manner by
which the treatment affected the subjects and to discover the reasons behind the
effects of such treatment on the subjects.” (Baraceros, 2016, p. 98)
The following list of steps explains the process of conducting experimental research in
more detail. Researchers should follow these steps in order to ensure the integrity of the
process.
Experimental Factors - these are factors that you can specify (and set the levels)
and then assign at random as the treatment to the experimental units. Examples
would be temperature, level of an additive fertilizer amount per acre, etc.
Classification Factors - can't be changed or assigned, these come as labels on the
experimental units. The age and sex of the participants are classification factors
which can't be changed or randomly assigned. But you can select individuals from
these groups randomly.
Quantitative Factors - you can assign any specified level of a quantitative factor.
Examples: percent or pH level of a chemical.
Qualitative Factors - have categories which are different types. Examples might be
species of a plant or animal, a brand in the marketing field, gender, - these are not
ordered or continuous but are arranged perhaps in sets.
The steps in the following checklist summarize a very large number of decisions that
need to be made at each stage of the experimental planning process. The steps are
not independent, and at any stage, it may be necessary to go back and revise some
of the decisions made at an earlier stage.
Checklist
6 steps in planning a survey that will help you avoid the most common mistakes.
(2019, January 09). Retrieved from https://www.netigate.net/articles/survey-tips/6-
steps-in-planning-a-survey-that-will-help-you-avoid-the-most-common-mistakes/
Dean, A., Voss, D., & Draguljic, D. (2017). Planning Experiments. Retrieved from
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319522487
Rawley, E. (2017, June 06). Planning and Conducting Surveys. Retrieved from
https://www.ck12.org/statistics/planning-and-conducting-
surveys/lesson/Planning-and-Conducting-Surveys-ALG-I/