Why Use Surveys?
Use surveys if you want to make generalizable claims about a larger number of people.
Use surveys if you think you can get a large and representative population.
Use surveys if you want to confirm or find frequencies for phenomena you’ve learned about using methods that produce more detailed result.
Benefits:
- Surveys potentially allow research to reach a large number of people.
- Surveys are flexible. Data collection can occur independent of researcher availability.
- Surveys can accommodate both qualitative (open ended) and quantitative (multiple choice, t/f, scale) questions.
Tips from the Professor: Surveys are great used in combination with a richer method of data collection such as interviews or focus groups! They help you to confirm findings across a broader population and potentially triangulate data.
More on Surveys:
Data gathered from a survey can be qualitative, quantitative, or both.
- Open ended questions produce qualitative data, this is generally more time consuming to analyze, but produces more detailed results.
- Data will tend to be in text form.
- Scale-based (likert scale) true/false, or rating questions produced quantitative data. These can be analyzed using basic or inferential statistics.
- Data will be numeric or yes/no, t/f.
- In both cases, the way you structure your questions matters. Garbage in = garbage out, so crafting questions well is key, and test them if possible.
Check out this overview of survey research chapter [link] from the Research Methods in Psychology Open Textbook (care of BC Campus).
The next page will discuss survey question design [link]. This is crucial in order to get useful data from your survey.