{"id":419,"date":"2018-11-05T21:52:37","date_gmt":"2018-11-05T21:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/course.oeru.org\/irmp102\/?page_id=419"},"modified":"2018-11-05T21:52:37","modified_gmt":"2018-11-05T21:52:37","slug":"survey-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/course.oeru.org\/irmp102\/learning-pathways\/nonexperimental-research-methods\/survey-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Survey Research"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nA survey<\/b> is a way of gathering information by the use of old-fashioned questionnaires, verbally, or the Internet. Surveys consist of administering a series of predetermined questions to a group of individuals. The individuals respond to the survey either in an oral or written form, and the researcher then summarizes the responses by averaging across the individual responses. Compared to a study conducted in a psychology laboratory, surveys can reach a much larger number of participants at a much lower cost.\n<\/p>\n

When an attempt is made to include every member of a specified population in the study, the survey is called a census<\/b>. More often, however, data are collected from a subset of the population. The subset is called a sample<\/b>, and the investigator conducting a survey usually chooses people for the sample by a method intended to ensure that the distribution of important characteristics is the same in the sample as it is in the population (you will learn more about these methods in the section “Conducting Surveys”<\/a><\/span> in Chapter 9<\/a><\/span> of your textbook). To the extent that this goal is achieved, the investigator will be able to generalize the survey results from the sample that was studied to the wider population.\n<\/p>\n

Advantages of survey research<\/span><\/h3>\n