Social Surveys

Social Surveys

1. What are these?

   • Written questionnaires
   • Interviews

2. Two main question types used in social surveys

   • Open ended
   • Closed ended

3. Hypothesis

   • A possible explanation that can be tested by collecting evidence to see if it is true or false

4. Operationalising Concepts

   • Enable difficult concepts to be understood by all

5. Pilot Study

   • Advantages
     • May show that some things are badly worded/hard to understand or that the answers are hard to analyse. After pilot should be able to finalise qunn.
   • It is a study sent to a smaller sample of people to help identify problems with the questions to help the questionnaire be finalised

6. Why sample?

   • Purpose is to ensure these people who are in the study are representative of the research population. Important if we want to generalise

7. Stages of conducting a study

   • Choose topic
     • Determine aim
       • Operationalise concepts
         • Pilot study
           • Select sample
             • Decide how to do it e.g. face-to-face/postal ect.
               • Conduct survey
                 • analyse data

8. Types of sample

   • random sample
     • Sample is selected purely by chance e.g. names out of a hat
     • Quasi random sample
       • every 10th or 100th name on a list is selected
     • This may make the sample unrepresentative as we don't know if we have the same amount of each sex
   • Stratified sampling
     • Dividing population into male and female then taking a 1% sample of each
   • Quota sampling
     • Instead of randomly selecting the 1% sample you go looking for it
   • Snowball Sample
     • Contact a few key people who contact others and so on. Used to study sensitive groups e.g. criminals ect.
   • Oppertunity Sampling
     • Choosing individuals who are easy to access

9. Why may some groups not respond to surveys?

   • In case some answers are passed to police ect.