CHAPTER 7: (pg. 131-143) September 25, 2019 1:11 PM Survey Research: - uses questionnaires and interviews to ask people to provide information about themselves- their attitudes and beliefs, demographics (age, sex, income, marital status, etc.), and other facts as well as past or intended future behaviours. - Researchers from both qualitative and quantitative approaches use surveys to collect data. - you might need to ask your participants some questions! - For correlational research - As the DV in an experiment - As a manipulation check in an experiment - What questions will you ask and how will you word them? - How will participants respond? Do you know? - Remember to proofread and pilot the questions - What kind of info might you need to find out from the participants? - Attitudes and beliefs - Facts and demographics - Behavioural frequencies - For your labs, only things that are appropriate to be self- reported Why Conduct Surveys? - Multitude of surveys conducted all the time- e.g. newspaper, university survey, websites, etc. - Provide methodology for asking people to tell us about themselves >> they're important because society demands about issues rather than only intuition and anecdotes - In Universities: help determine changes to be made in the curriculum - Public Agencies/ Government: help make policy decisions - Basic Research: many imp. Variables including attitudes, current emotional states, and self reports of behaviours, are easily studied using questionnaires or interviews - Often provide a snapshot of how a particular group of people think and behave at any given point in time. - Can be used to gather data to study relationship between variables as well as attitude and behaviour change over time or among different groups of people - Survey result are non- experimental, thus can not imply causation. - Easier method to gather information. e.g. asking students about their work through a survey is more efficient than visiting each student's place of work and measuring their work hours. Panel Studies/ Longitudinal Studies: - When the same people are tracked and surveyed at two or more points in time, the design is called panel study or longitudinal study - Two- wave panel study: people are surveyed at two points in time - Three-wave panel study: people are surveyed at three points in time - Panel studies are important when the research question addresses the relationship between one variable at "time one" and another variable at some later "time two". - e.g. to examine children's aggressive behaviour, new parents and children are surveyed every two years on a variety of variables related to family life, health, and development. The study shows that children who reported feeling more nurtured and loved by their parents right before puberty engaged in less direct aggression (fist fights) and less indirect aggression (gossip) two years later. Response Bias in Survey Research - Response Set: a tendency to respond to all questions from a particular perspective rather than to provide answers that are directly related to the question.