SURVEYS

Interviews

Structured/Unstructured (conversational, follow-up questions)

Interview aspects

• Costly (interview training, salary, travel)

• Often qualitative (subjective)

Interview concerns

• Interview bias

  • Affecting participant responses

  • Interpretating participant answers

Phone surveys

Structured/Unstructured

Aspect of phone surveys

• Was easy to get random samples

  • Cell phones & telemarketers ruined that

  • Cheaper

  • Fewer social desirability concerns

Questionnaires

Paper/electronic

Aspect of questionnaires

• Cheapest

• Surface level info

• Fewer social desirability concerns

• Extremely common

Advantages of questionnaires

• Easy to give out & score

• Can assess non-observable variables

• Can asses variables you can’t manipulate

Disadvantages of questionnaires

• Accuracy can be low

  • People lacking insight

  • Forgetting previous behavior

  • Social desirable responses

Clearly define variable (1)

• Should reflect the research question

• May include diff operations of same variable

(2) Developing valid survey questions

Should be easy to understand

• Prevent yea-saying and nay-saying

  • When participants agree/disagree with all items because they are not paying attention

  • Reversing the wording of some items can prevent this

(3) How participants answer your questions

Open vs. close-ended questions

Close-ended questions

Give a limited number of responses

• Rating scales; quantitative

Likert scale

• Specific type of rating scale

• Assess degree of agreement/disagreement

Need to consider for close-ended questions

• Number of response options (5-7 is sufficient)

• Odd numbers allow neutral responses; even numbers allow participants to lean a certain way

• How to label the scale

  • Labels = anchors

    • Can affect how people respond

Aspects of close-ended questions

• Easy to score

• Might neglect important info

• Won’t obtain tangential info

Open-ended questions

Allow participants to respond however they want

• Qualitative

Advantages of open-ended questions

Tend to provide much more info (but people may not provide it)

Disadvantages of open-ended questions

• Decide how to score responses

• Takes more time to analyze

(4) Assemble your survey

• Organize in a way that’s easy for participants to understand

• Viewable on different devices?

• Order matters; but if there’s no bias, you can randomize it