Research Skills for Students

Brian Allison, Anne Hilton, Tim O'Sullivan, Alun Owen, Arthur Rothwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781135361693
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This fully photocopiable teaching resource provides tutors with a varied and lively range of learning activities and exercises to use with students to help equip them with the skills needed to plan for a research project in higher education.

Part B: Planning a sample survey

Introduction

This part is aimed at anyone considering undertaking a sample survey who has little previous experience of doing so. It aims to improve your awareness of the things you can do, as well as highlighting some of the potential pitfalls and ways to avoid them, after which you should be able to plan and undertake a more effective sample survey.

Most of the key ingredients for performing a successful survey are covered, but with the emphasis on the basics. It should therefore provide enough detail for most undergraduate research. The use of statistical theory is deliberately avoided to keep the focus sharply on survey methodology, although part of the role that statistics plays in sample surveys is outlined for you to follow up where appropriate.

Objectives.

After working through the exercises in this part, you should be able to:

• explain, the meaning of some of the basic jargon used in sample surveys;
• distinguish between and describe some of the alternative approaches for conducting a sample survey;
• select an appropriate approach for conducting your survey;
• describe the benefits of and undertake a pilot survey;
• give examples of some of the common problems encountered with sample surveys, and tips to avoid them;
• plan and undertake a more effective sample survey.

How to proceed

It is assumed that you are hoping to undertake a sample survey. Some of the activities, therefore, relate to your own sample survey: if you do not have a survey in mind, then you can ignore these particular activities. Each chapter builds on the work of previous ones, and it would be best to study the part in this order, but at your own pace.

Preliminary activity

In Chapter 11, the Bibliography, are two additional sections:

• a pro forma of a survey plan, which is to be used as a working document and completed as you work through the activities. (You may wish to copy it out for rough work initially.)
• a number of survey examples, some of which are based on real surveys that have been conducted. These will be used in many of the activities as a basis for discussion.

3 Where should you start?

A typical approach

Below is a flow chart which shows a poor but all too common approach to undertaking a sample survey.

Problems with this typical approach

No initial thought is given to the aims of the survey. As a result, the information/data may not be appropriate (eg wrong data collected, or data collected on wrong subjects, or not enough data collected). Consequently, you may not be able to do the data analysis you would like.

The library loan survey (survey example 1, page 65)

Suppose we simply went ahead and only recorded the number of times each book in the sample was borrowed during the year. After conducting the survey we might wonder whether or not there are any differences in the loan rates between various degree courses. If we had not thought about recording the courses that the students borrowing the books were on (assuming of course this is available), we could not do this analysis.

A better approach

The flow chart below shows how it perhaps should be done.

The key point is the order in which things should come. You should formulate the aims of your survey and decide what data analysis is needed right at the beginning.

With the library loan survey, having formulated the aims of the survey, we would have realised that we wished to compare courses. Therefore, for each book, we know we would need to record not only the number of borrowers, but also the course each of those borrowers was on.

Activity 3.1

You will see that each of the survey examples has an aim(s). Jot down the aim(s) of your survey, and perhaps make a note of the title and the location(s) of your survey.

If you haven't already thought of how you are going to analyse your data, you should do one of the following:

• Give the data analysis some thought and come back to this part later,
• Leave the decision over which data to collect until you have worked through this part, but still give it the thought it requires before you conduct the survey.

4 Sample survey jargon

Before we move on to look at methods of conducting your survey, we need to explain some basic jargon. This will allow us to talk more easily about sample surveys and allow you to thumb through some of the references given in Chapter 11, the Bibliography.

Some basic jargon

Subject (or element)

Either of these words is used to refer to whatever it is you are hoping to obtain information about or from.

Since a lot of sample surveys are conducted on human populations, the subject is often individual people. This is the case in the pre-election poll (survey examples B and C on pages 65-6). For the library loan survey, the subject is a book.

Sample

This is the group of subjects from whom you actually intend to collect information, by interviewing, observing or measuring, etc.

Population

The population is the larger collection of all the subjects, from which your sample was drawn, that you wish to apply (statisticians use the word infer) your conclusions to.

Activity 4.1

For each of the survey examples, have a go at jotting down what you think the subject is. The first two have been done for you. See Appendix 1, page 55, for the solution.

Survey example	Subject
A	Book
B	Person

Activity 4.2

On your survey plan, state what the subject is for your own sample survey. Leave the population for now, as shortly we will see that this requires further thought.

Target population and study population

There are really two populations that exist within your survey, and understanding how they relate to each other is the key to obtaining a sample which is representative of the population

• The target population is the population from which you would like to obtain a sample and to which you would like to apply your conclusions.
• The study population simply consists of subjects whose characteristics are similar to those of the subjects in the sample. In other words, the sample is always representative of the study population.

A pictorial view of how the sample relates to the target and study populations.

Notice how the sample is inside the s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• A Research methods
• B Planning a sample survey
• C Questionnaire design
• D Research interviews