Unit 1-Conducting a Survey.pptVIP

Activity 2: Read the passage in Section 2 and complete the following paragraph. Therefore, you should carefully design your questionnaire and select a 4) ______________ that is representative of the entire population to be surveyed. When presenting your results, you should be careful to 5) _______________ between the factual or numerical results and your interpretations of the results. Conducting a Survey Conducting a survey is often a useful way of finding something out, especially when ‘human factors’ are underinvestigation. This passage is intended primarily for those who are new to a survey. Many people make use of questionnaires to ask questions of a large number of persons. In most cases, only a small number of people surveyed will respond, and the more complex the questionnaire the fewer responses there will be. The following aresome suggestions about conducting a survey: ? Decide what the objectives of the study are. Ensure that you can phrase these objectives as questions or measurements. If you can’t, don’t start. ? Decide what to ask in your survey, or what to measure, that will give you answers to the questions you have selected. If the questions prove to be unanswerable, don’t start. ? People will not find time to fill in your questionnaire if they think it is a waste of time. People are more likely to think this if the questionnaire is poorly presented or ungrammatical. If your grammar and spelling are weak, get the questionnaire checked by someone else before you send it off. ? For certainty, we must survey the entire population. It’s as simple as that. Of course in practice we can’t do this, because there isn’t enough time or money for such an undertaking. A typical target is that of 95% confidence. Expressed simply, this means that we survey enough people that we can be 95% sure that the outcome applies to the population as well as the survey group. Note that ‘95% sure’ in this case has a precise math