What is a survey?
A survey, or questionnaire, is a research method used by social scientists to gather people’s views about a topic. They can be easily created and sent to many people for them to respond. They are a great source of information, as the researcher is able to ask specific questions that relate to your research and they are relatively cheap to make and distribute. This guide will explain how to make a great survey that will help answer your research questions.
Open/Closed Questions
The first consideration is the type of questions you will ask in your survey. Open questions are designed to allow the respondent to freely give their opinion without restriction. Closed questions are designed to guide the respondent to a certain set of answers.
Consider the following question, asked two different ways:
| Open | What age are you? | |||
| Closed | What age are you? | Under 18 | 19-30 | 31+ |
In the ‘open’ example, there are hundreds of conceivable examples. Not only could respondents enter an almost unlimited quantity of numbers, but they could also write their age out in words, with spaces, with dashes. When reviewing this information, it will be unmanageable.
However, in the closed example, you’ll see that respondents can only choose three categories. This means that you will only have three potential answers to deal with.
Quantitative v Qualitative
| Open | Tell me what issues you think there are in prisons. | |||
| Closed | What do you think is the biggest issue in prison? | Drugs | Education | Healthcare |
If you were to collate the information from the answers in the first example, you could bullet point or categorise the answers, but this would take a long time to do. The second example would be very easy to make into a pie or bar chart; which would be simple to understand and analyse.
The first question is an example of a qualitative question – the respondent can give as much information as they wish – meaning that you get a good quality answer.
The second question is an example of a quantitative question where you will get a large quantity of data that is easy to count and analyse.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and it is likely that you will want to use a combination of the two types of question. Surveys lend themselves to more closed questions.
| Advantages of Closed Questions | Advantages of Open Questions |
|---|---|
| Easy to collate information into graphs.
Easier and quicker for respondents to answer. Easy to compare the answers of respondents. |
Respondents can give as much detail as they wish.
Answers to the question can indicate areas the researcher did not consider. Answers can inform the researcher about further areas of research. |
Sample Size and Demographics
Your sample is the group of people that respond to your survey. Depending on who you ask will make a huge difference to the results of your survey.
Size
In order to make your survey results valid, you have to ask a representative number of people. The number of people you survey will depend on what you are researching!
For example, if you are researching Scottish attitudes to independence, you are researching a whole country and so, therefore, your sample should be very large. Around 1,000 people would be sufficient. However, if you are researching your school’s pupil’s attitudes to independence, your sample could be much smaller – perhaps 50.
Demographic
Your demographic refers to the diversity of your sample. This includes factors such as:
- age
- gender
- ethnicity
- disability
- sexuality
All of this is important as, depending on how your group is made up will depend on what answers you receive. For example, if you were to ask a group of black teenagers about social issues in the UK, you would receive a very different response than you would from elderly white people.
Professional survey companies spend a lot of money trying to perfect their demographics – which will be a limit for most school pupils! You could, however, try and spread out your demographic by sending your survey to family members and friends in other classes, rather than just asking people in your class.
Survey Method
There are lots of ways you could carry out your survey, from in person on paper, on the phone or online. The easiest and cheapest (free) way is, of course, online using a survey creation website. Did you know that you can use Glow to make free surveys? See here how to create a survey using Microsoft Forms on Glow.
You could make a survey and stop people in the street or in the supermarket. This has the advantage of the researcher being able to clarify any questions the respondent is finding difficult. People are also much less likely to ignore a survey in person, rather than if it was posted or emailed to them. The disadvantage of this is that it is much more time consuming for the researcher.
In all cases, you should draft your survey first before creating an online version. It’s also a good idea to get a friend, teacher, parent or carer to check it to make sure that they understand what the questions mean.
