My Research Survey

In my blog post from February 2nd 2011, I mentioned several resources for constructing proper and effective questionaire surveys. After an initial draft version I have now put up online my anonymous online survey. Please feel free to visit and help me with my research by filling out the questionaire at www.newsmental.com/survey.aspx.

I designed the survey by following some of the principles mentioned in my blog post from February 2nd, but most of all I made an effort to keep the survey as short as possible (it only takes about 1 minute to fill out) as I really don't like to fill out 20 minute long surveys. So it should only take about a minute to fill out, if it doesn't or if you have any issues, comments feel free to leave me a message.

Constructing Surveys

Today I was looking at survey construction and survey design, since I have to prepare a survey. I intend to use the results of the survey to support a specific argument in my PhD Thesis. It isn't a large part of my work, and hence I don't want to spend too much time on this, however not surprisingly I found a lot of excellent sources on survey construction (whether offline, online, free form - interview, or closed form, see this link for a wider set of survey definitions).

An excellent introduction to surveys in social sciences, detailing the different types of answer collection (i.e. likert scales, guttman scales, semantic differentials, ranking and filter/contingency questions) can be found here. Some example questions are provided here. Maybe most useful to serious and academic-level research, are these resources: 1-a journal article detailing the stages of interview construction in a systematic manner, 2-a report for the US-Census Buro (2006) on question types and question styles (e.g. mentions academic research that argues against using "Don't know" answers in interviews, and reasons why that is the case).