Doing Survey Research

The significantly updated third edition of this short, practical book prepares students to write a questionnaire, generate a sample, conduct their own survey research, analyse data, and write up the results, while learning to read and interpret excerpts from published research. It combines statistics and survey research methods in a single book.

Designing and Doing Survey Research is an introduction to the processes and methods of planning and conducting survey research in the real world. Taking a mixed method approach throughout, the book provides step-by-step guidance on: • Designing your research • Ethical issues • Developing your survey questions • Sampling • Budgeting, scheduling and managing your time • Administering your survey • Preparing for data analysis With a focus on the impact of new technologies, this book provides a cutting-edge look at how survey research is conducted today as well as the challenges survey researchers face. Packed full of international examples from various social science disciplines, the book is ideal for students and researchers new to survey research.

Each day we are faced with continuing claims made by media pundits, politicians, teachers, and friends, often quoting research. Consider also the numerous comments and posts on Internet blogs, Twitter, and Facebook that illustrate the confusion between opinion and factual data. How do we learn to interpret the research we hear about and read, to distinguish opinions from scientific facts, and to use this knowledge to conduct our own studies to answer the questions faced in everyday situations? Understanding the components that go into scientific research and learning how to do research, make decisions about which statistics to use, and analyze statistical findings are goals for everyone in today's research-oriented world. Questions about the reliability and validity of data from a study or public opinion poll come up routinely and need critical review. This book contributes to achieving these objectives. Doing Survey Research is intended for people who want to learn how to conduct quantitative studies for a project in an undergraduate course, a graduate-level thesis, or a survey that an employer may want completed. This brief, practical textbook prepares beginners to conduct their own survey research and write up the results, as well as read and interpret other people's research. It combines survey design with data analysis and interpretation. And it is for those who need to understand and critically interpret survey research found in scholarly journals, reports distributed in the workplace, and social scientific findings presented online in the media, on a blog, or in social media postings. Essential new updates to this edition include coverage of Big Data, Meta-Analysis, and A/B testing methodology—methods used by scholars as well as businesses like Netflix and Amazon. New to this Fourth Edition Each chapter and its exercises feature updated data and illustrations from current academic and popular articles relevant to today’s web-oriented students, including studies focused on topics related to social media. Update web site http://doingsurveyresearch.wordpress.com/ New Coverage of Big Data (used by popular web sites like Amazon and Netflix) and the ethical issues which emerge not only about privacy, but also how it relates to the methods discussed in this book about sampling, probability, and research design. New coverage of meta-data, and the increasingly popular method in many professional and other settings.

The significantly updated third edition of this short, practical book prepares students to write a questionnaire, generate a sample, conduct their own survey research, analyse data, and write up the results, while learning to read and interpret excerpts from published research. It combines statistics and survey research methods in a single book.

Designing and Doing Survey Research is an introduction to the processes and methods of planning and conducting survey research. With a focus on the impact of new technologies, author Lesley Andres provides a cutting-edge look at how survey research is conducted today as well as the challenges survey researchers face. Packed full of international examples from various social science disciplines, the book is ideal for students and researchers new to survey research.

In this first book of the series Survey Methods in Educational Research, we have brought together leading authors and scholars in the field to discuss key introductory concepts in the creation, implementation, evaluation and dissemination of survey instruments and their resultant findings. While there are other textbooks that might introduce these concepts adequately well, the authors here have focused on the pragmatic issues that inevitably arise in the development and administration process of survey instruments. Drawing from their rich experiences, the authors present these potential speed bumps or road blocks a survey researcher in education or the social sciences might encounter. Referencing their own work and practice, the authors provide valuable suggestions for dealing with these issues “your advisor never told you about.” And all of the recommendations are aligned with standard protocols and current research on best practices in the field of research methodology. This book is broken into four broad units on creating survey items and instruments, administering surveys, analyzing the data from surveys, and stories of successful administrations modeling the entire research cycle. Each chapter focuses on a different concept in the survey research process, and the authors share their approaches to addressing the issues. These topics include survey item construction, scale development, cognitive interviewing, measuring change with self-report data, translation issues with surveys administered in multiple languages, working with school and program administrators when implementing surveys, a review of current software used in survey research, the use of weights, response styles, assessing validity of results, and effectively communicating your results and findings … and much more. The intended audience of the volume will be practitioners, administrators, teachers as researchers, graduate students, social science and education researchers not experienced in survey research, and students learning program evaluation. In brief, if you are considering doing survey research, this book is meant for you.

Vera Toepoel’s practical, how-to guide to doing surveys online takes you through the entire process of using surveys, from systematically recruiting respondents, to designing the internet survey, to processing the survey data and writing it up. This book helps students and researchers in identifying possible strategies to make the best use of online surveys, providing pro’s and con’s, and do’s and don’ts for each strategy. It also explores the latest opportunities and developments that have arisen in the field of online surveys, including using social networks, and provides expert guidance and examples of best practice throughout. Suitable for those starting a research project or conducting a survey in a professional capacity, this book is the ideal go-to reference for anyone using internet surveys, be it a beginner or a more experienced survey researcher.

This book addresses the needs of researchers who want to conduct surveys online. Issues discussed include sampling from online populations, developing online and mobile questionnaires, and administering electronic surveys, are unique to digital surveys. Others, like creating reliable and valid survey questions, data analysis strategies, and writing the survey report, are common to all survey environments. This single resource captures the particulars of conducting digital surveys from start to finish