Designing an effective survey requires as much art as skill. The more practice you get, the more you will come to appreciate the nuances of survey design. The process of designing a survey involves numerous iterations, with input from multiple members of a research team or sometimes from an advisory panel. Draft surveys are usually pre-tested and revised before they are administered. In the end, every little detail potentially matters and may contribute to measurement error, non-response bias, or both. Issues to think about:
Questions
Rumor has it that students at FAU are biking less than they used to. This might be happening for any number of reasons.
Hypotheses include:
Boca Raton has grown so students are living farther from campus (or outside of Boca)
Students are biking less as children and are less comfortable biking when they get to Boca
Students are working harder than ever and don’t have the time to bike
Biking is not seen as particularly cool any more
It’s not possible to go back in time to do a longitudinal study to see how these factors have changed, or even to see if biking levels have in fact changed. But it is possible to do a cross sectional study that determines the relative importance of these factors in explaining current levels of biking among students. Provide the following:
Who do you want to survey? Who is your population? How will you access them?
Write a question to assess the dependent variable. Open ended, closed ended, scale? Should this question be quantitative (measureable)?
Write one question for
each
of the hypotheses listed above. Open ended, closed ended, scale? Should this question be quantitative (measureable)?
Are there any
other
variables that might be influencing the level of biking? What else might you ask to find out?
How would you pretest your survey?
How would you administer your survey – mailed, group, phone, in-person interview, or electronic? What are the pros and cons of this approach?
...
Designing an effective survey requires as much art as skill. T
1. Designing an effective survey requires as much art as skill. The
more practice you get, the more you will come to appreciate the
nuances of survey design. The process of designing a survey
involves numerous iterations, with input from multiple members
of a research team or sometimes from an advisory panel. Draft
surveys are usually pre-tested and revised before they are
administered. In the end, every little detail potentially matters
and may contribute to measurement error, non-response bias, or
both. Issues to think about:
Questions
Rumor has it that students at FAU are biking less than they used
to. This might be happening for any number of reasons.
Hypotheses include:
Boca Raton has grown so students are living farther from
campus (or outside of Boca)
Students are biking less as children and are less comfortable
biking when they get to Boca
Students are working harder than ever and don’t have the time
to bike
Biking is not seen as particularly cool any more
2. It’s not possible to go back in time to do a longitudinal study to
see how these factors have changed, or even to see if biking
levels have in fact changed. But it is possible to do a cross
sectional study that determines the relative importance of these
factors in explaining current levels of biking among students.
Provide the following:
Who do you want to survey? Who is your population? How will
you access them?
Write a question to assess the dependent variable. Open ended,
closed ended, scale? Should this question be quantitative
(measureable)?
Write one question for
each
of the hypotheses listed above. Open ended, closed ended,
scale? Should this question be quantitative (measureable)?
Are there any
other
variables that might be influencing the level of biking? What
else might you ask to find out?
How would you pretest your survey?
How would you administer your survey – mailed, group, phone,
in-person interview, or electronic? What are the pros and cons
of this approach?
