1 / 9

What are social surveys?

What are social surveys?. Learning objective: To describe the use of social surveys in sociological research To outline the main ways of delivering questionnaires . What are social surveys?.

nayef
Download Presentation

What are social surveys?

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. What are social surveys? Learning objective: To describe the use of social surveys in sociological research To outline the main ways of delivering questionnaires

  2. What are social surveys? • Social surveys involve collecting information from a large number of people, usually through questionnaires or structured interviews. They are used by opinion pollsters, market researchers and government departments as well as social researchers

  3. Asking questions through questionnaires • Questionnaire consists of a list of pre-set questions to which the respondent supplies the answers. The questions are standardized so each respondent answers an identical set of questions, presented in exactly the same order

  4. 3 ways of delivering questionnaires • Postal questionnaires: the self-completion questionnaire is mailed or emailed to the respondent • Hand delivered questionnaires: the researcher hands the questionnaire to the respondent and returns to collect it from the respondent • Formal or structured interviews: reading a standard of questions from the interview schedule and the respondent gives the answers then and there. They can be carried out face to face or by the telephone

  5. Closed or fixed choice questions • They require respondents to choose between a number of given answers, often by just ticking the appropriate box in response to a set question so it can be answered quite quickly • These responses could be easily added up and presented in numerical form (quantitative data) • Problem: researchers could not find out details about specific questions. It is also essential that all possible answers are anticipated and included in the questionnaire (wording also important to ensure the meaning is clear)

  6. Open-ended questions • This method enables respondents to put forward their own answers to the set questions rather then choosing a specific response from several preset answers

  7. Your challenge Pretend you are a researcher, you are to come up with a hypothesis you would like to test out on this class. Take the next 10-15mins jotting down 3 open-ended questions to ask and 3 closed/fixed-choice questions to ask.

  8. Checking your understanding • Identify two different ways of delivering questionnaires • Explain one difference between open-ended and closed questionnaires

  9. Homework: • Write a paragraph explaining why the answers to closed questions would be easier and less time consuming for the researcher to make use of than open ended questions

More Related