Abstract
This chapter instructs students on how to conduct a survey. Topics covered include question design, question wording, the use of open- and closed-ended questions, measurement, pre-testing, and refining a survey. As part of this chapter, students construct their own survey.
Keywords
- Pointless Question
- Rank-order Questions
- German Christian Democratic Party
- Negative Questions
- Value-laden Questions
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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- 1.
For data analytical reasons, it is important to specify your dependent variable as a continuous variable, as the statistical techniques, you will learn later frequently require that the dependent variable is continuous.
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Further Reading
Nuts and Bolts of Survey Research
Nardi, P. M. (2018). Doing survey research: A guide to quantitative methods. London: Routledge (Chap. 1; Chap. 4). Chapter 1 of this book provides a nice introduction why we do survey research, why it is important, and what important insights it can bring to the social sciences. Chapter 4 gives a nice introduction into questionnaire developments and the different steps that go into the construction of a survey.
Constructing a Survey
Krosnick, J. A. (2018). Questionnaire design. In The Palgrave handbook of survey research (pp. 439–455). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Short and comprehensive summary of the dominant literature into questionnaire design. Good as a first read of the topic.
Saris, W. E., & Gallhofer, I. N. (2014). Design, evaluation, and analysis of questionnaires for survey research. San Francisco: Wiley. A very comprehensive guide into the design of surveys. Among others, the book thoroughly discusses how concepts become questions, how we can come up with response categories for the questions we use, and how to structure questions.
Applied Texts: Question Wording
Lundmark, S., Gilljam, M., & Dahlberg, S. (2015). Measuring generalized trust: An examination of question wording and the number of scale points. Public Opinion Quarterly, 80(1), 26–43. The authors show that the question wording of the general questions about trust in other individuals (i.e. generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted?) matters in getting accurate responses.
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Stockemer, D. (2019). Constructing a Survey. In: Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99118-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99118-4_4
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