It may not surprise you to learn that researchers have recently reported that a substantial percentage of college students do not sleep well. How do we know this? Lund, Reider, Whiting, and Prichard (2010) conducted a survey; they asked over a thousand students at a midwestern university questions about their sleep habits.
When you conduct a survey, you are attempting to estimate the opinions, characteristics, and/ or behaviors of a particular population by asking a sample to respond to questions. A population (sometimes called a target population or a population of interest) is a defined group of individuals, and it can be very large (such as all American adults) or it can be more specific (such as all female Democrats in the Princeton, NJ area). A sample is a subset of individuals chosen from a population.
Many of us have been exposed to surveys. For example, during political campaigns, you may have been asked for your views on the candidates. According to one Gallup poll, shortly before the 2008 election, almost 40% of 18-to 29-year-olds had been contacted by either the Obama or the McCain campaign (Newport, Jones, & Saad, 2008).
The same Gallup poll asked respondents whether they were registered to vote, whether they were giving a lot of thought to the election, and what was their chance of voting. These measures were used as voter turn-out indicators. With these numbers in hand, researchers were able to predict the likely turn-out of the youngest US voters on election day.
To survey a population, you need to know what kinds of questions to ask, how to write effective ones, and how to obtain and contact your participant sample. These topics will each be covered in this chapter.
Survey Questions
In this section we will discuss different types of question content (demographic versus topical) as well as different types of question formats (openversus closed-ended questions).