3.7(b) Conducting a survey - Designing a Questionnaire

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En provenance du cours de The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Social Science Approaches to the Study of Chinese Society Part 2

7 notes

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Social Science Approaches to the Study of Chinese Society Part 2

7 notes

This course is intended as a first step for learners who seek to become producers of social science research. It is organized as an introduction to the design and execution of a research study. It introduces the key elements of a proposal for a research study, and explains the role of each. It reviews the major types of qualitative and quantitative data used in social science research, and then introduces some of the most important sources of existing data available freely or by application, worldwide and for China. The course offers an overview of basic principles in the design of surveys, including a brief introduction to sampling. Basic techniques for quantitative analysis are also introduced, along with a review of common challenges that arise in the interpretation of results. Professional and ethical issues that often arise in the conduct of research are also discussed. The course concludes with an introduction to the options for further study available to the interested student, and an overview of the key steps involved in selecting postgraduate programs and applying for admission. Learners who complete the course will be able to make an informed decision about whether to pursue advanced studies, and should be adequately prepared to write an application for postgraduate study that exhibits basic understanding of key aspects of social science research paradigms and methodologies. Explore the big questions in social science and learn how you can be a producer of social science research. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/QuMOAlwhpvU Part 1 should be completed before taking this course: https://www.coursera.org/learn/social-science-study-chinese-society

À partir de la leçon

Sampling

By the end of Week 3, you should be able to understand why RANDOM SAMPLING is important in a survey, outline the most common approaches to sampling and discuss key considerations when choosing a sampling strategy for your study.

3.1. Overview: Sampling2:56

3.2. Surveys and sampling13:21

3.3. Probability sampling12:38

3.4. Clustered sampling17:22

3.5. Stratification, oversampling13:59

3.6. Respondent-driven sampling7:50

3.7(a) Conducting a survey - Preparation10:13

3.7(b) Conducting a survey - Designing a Questionnaire9:04

3.8. Response rates and follow-up7:22

3.9. Summary2:22

Rencontrer les enseignants

Cameron Campbell
Professor of Social Science
Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science

[MUSIC]

I want to talk now about some key considerations in questionnaire design.

In fact, questionnaire design is as much of an art as a science.

Most students learn questionnaire design not so much from classes but

by actually joining ongoing research projects.

In which questionnaires are being designed and then looking at them and

learning about the process in a hands on way.

That said, I can at least outline a few key principles to keep in mind

if you design a questionnaire.

One is that you need to minimize the amount of thinking

that a respondent has to do to answer the question.

Basically, as much as possible, the questions should be clear, concise, short.

They should not require additional explanation.

Hopefully the respondent, upon hearing the question foreseeing it will immediately

know exactly what is needed from them without further interpretation or

explanation.

Each item in a questionnaire,

that is each question should only seek to measure one underlying dimension.

Don't mix apples and oranges.

So if you are interested in collecting information about age.

Then only ask about age.

If you're asking about some attitude about a particular topic,

the question should not refer to any other topics.

You also want to avoid too much reading or listening.

So it may be that respondents will tune out If they have to read too much or

listen to too much, there is a few special exceptions, but for

the most part the questions again should be short.

Make sure that the questions are relevant to the respondent's education,

experience, knowledge and so forth.

Ask questions that the respondent is capable of answering.

So one particular problem that I've seen is that sometimes,

people that are new to questionnaire design, they may ask respondents not about

their personal situation, but about their opinion of what people like them feel.

So rather than asking a respondent, what they think of a particular social topic.

They may ask a respondent what people like them think about that social topic,

in other words, asking the respondent to speak on behalf of some larger group.

Now, that's not normally a useful approach, because a respondent may

actually not know what other people that make up their group are actually thinking.

More technical issues, that questionnaires typically use skip patterns.

To ensure that respondents are only asked questions,

that are specifically relevant to their experience.

So in a survey, that includes a sample that has both men and

women, if there are questions about previous pregnancies normally

a skip pattern would be used according to which men who complete

the survey would be directed away from answering questions about pregnancy

because obviously they wouldn’t be able to answer them in a meaningful way.

There's also some issues that come up in the ordering of questions,

some general principles.

The ordering of questions is important.

Most surveys begin by putting the most straightforward questions about

non-sensitive issues, at the beginning of the survey.

This also helps build some trust or rapport with the interviewee because

the questions are fairly innocuous and straightforward.

Questionnaires then therefore begin with collection of information about social

demographic or economic characteristics of the interviewee.

And then questionnaires save the most sensitive questions for

the end of the survey.

By which time, hopefully, the interviewer has established a relationship with

the interviewee and the interviewee has opened up a bit become more trusting.

The ordering of questions is especially important when it comes to

attitudinal questions, for example on opinion polls.

We know that the ordering of questions about attitudes for

particular topics may influence the results that the respondents give.

I want to talk a little bit about online surveys.

They've gotten a lot of attention.

Now, you've probably,

at some point seen some online survey since you've been browsing the web.

You may have been invited to complete an online survey.

Again quite often, they are perhaps used more for entertainment than for

anything else.

Perhaps a news website may invite readers to

complete a very brief survey indicating their attitude about a particular poll.

Now, online surveys do seem attractive in that they promise to

allow the collection of an enormous amount of information very quickly.

So we see sometimes online surveys with hundreds of thousands, or

even millions of responses.

That come in very quickly.

The problem is that we really don't know how representative an online

population is, whether you can generalize from anything that you

learn online to some other real population out there in the world.

You think about what kind of people spend a lot of time on the internet and

might even have the time free to complete an online survey.

There are proposed solutions especially when it comes to academic

research involving online surveys, involving re-waiting and so forth.

So, for example if an online survey Includes questions about the demographic

characteristics of the respondent, their age, their sex, their race, and so forth.

People have suggested that these can be used to

reweight the answers to make the respondents on the online survey,

the data representative of some larger population.

Again, that's controversial, because online users,

even if you are able to re-weight the numbers to make it appear

representative of the larger population, the people that are online may still be

different from the quote real population in important ways.

What's most promising, especially for academic research, are hybrid approaches

in which subjects perhaps are initially contacted in person, or by mail and

perhaps even interviewed and then follow up is conducted online.

Or subjects are recruited with a piece of mail from an official address

perhaps especially for a government survey that explains the survey and

then gives a web address for the respondents to go to complete the survey.

There, because we have some control over the sample,

we can select the people we invite to participate in the survey

according to traditional sampling techniques.

And then the online portion is basically a convenience for

the people that have been selected and agree to participate in the interview,

then we have a lot less problem with representativeness, than an online survey

that consists of simply putting up a web page, and then asking people to click on

a link to complete a survey, again, with no attempt at traditional sampling.

So, this sort of online hybridization is especially important and

potentially useful for longitudinal surveys.

So, there are longitudinal surveys that are hybrids,

where perhaps at regular intervals, perhaps a few years apart, there

are in person surveys where interviewers go to visit people at their homes, and

they have long questionnaires but maybe takes several hours to complete.

But then in the time between those in person visits, the respondents

are invited to complete, perhaps brief update questionnaires online.

Perhaps providing information about recent activities like employment or

their relationships status.

So again, this integration of detailed data collection in person and

then more sporadic and less detailed data collection online in between those in

person visits is a very promising approach for the future of longitudinal surveys.

So hopefully, I've at least introduced you

to some of the basic considerations the practical considerations

you'll have to keep in mind if you're actually going to conduct a survey.

Assuming that you figured out how you're going to do your sampling and

you need to start thinking about how you're going to design your questionnaire

and what sort of format the survey will be in.

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