We’ve been tasked to create a survey in order to reach the next step of answering our own research question. Why? survey’s provide potentially helpful information that can be personalized for what you are trying to understand. A lot of the resources I’ve come across have been very helpful, but a survey will get me the answers I specifically want.
Especially with the topic of politics, there are so many things that I could ask. The challenge really comes down to what I should include, and what I could do without. My final goal is to find out how the student body currently feels with regards to the presidential race going on. Then, I would be able to take the data and perhaps compare it to some of my sources that focused on what campuses were generally like in the past. To do this, I need to set up a couple things
1. Sample Population
First and foremost, I’d need a sample population. Easiest access would be SCU students, and hopefully I could get different groups on campus fully represented. Needing 30 responses that covers the main thoughts of the whole campus can be a daunting task though, so I’ve chosen to hand out surveys to two of my classes in the hopes that the students in there will eagerly participate. At the same time the survey will be online, so hopefully I’ll be able to garner some interest there as well.
2. Willingness to Survey
As noted above, it can be hard to get people to actually take your survey. Why? Well if someone posted a link about a survey, I wouldn’t just voluntarily click on it and answer it. I have better things to do, yeah? A good way to combat this would be to individually message people on Facebook of Gmail. I’ve done this a lot in the past for various group projects and it’s surprisingly helpful. Last time for an AP Bio project, my group and I got over 300 responses simply because we took the time to reach out to people.
3. Correctly worded Questions
Questions must remain clear. If they get too difficult, people click away. Too repetitive, same issue. Therefore I really tried to spend a lot of time on having my questions potentially prove a point for me, while not being to ridiculously hard to answer. Also, I put a variety of types of questions, some with scales, others with free response boxes. Hopefully mixing it up would give me a good batch of quantitative and qualitative variables, which could eventually be turned into graphs or used for further analysis.