第五章-调查（ chapter5- surveys）.docVIP

Chapter 5 - Surveys Sometimes your data analysis skills will be applied to data that have been collected by others, government agencies, for example. At other times you will have to collect it yourself. The most widely used method is survey research, more popularly known as public opinion polling (although many applications involve special populations rather than the general public). A survey has the following elements: 1. An information goal or set of goals. 2. A sample. 3. A questionnaire. 4. A collection method (personal interview, telephone interview, self-administered questionnaire).? 5. Coding and analysis. Getting to an information goal was discussed in chapter 1. This chapter is about the mechanics of getting to that goal by the survey method. SAMPLING General principles The kind of sample you draw depends, of course, on the method of data collection. If you are going to do it by mail, you need a sample that includes addresses. If by phone, you need phone numbers. If in person and at home, you can get by without either of these, at least in the opening stages. You will probably use instead the census count of housing units. Regardless of the method, the basic statistical rule of sampling still applies: Each member of the population to which you wish to generalize must have a known chance of being included in the sample. The simplest way to achieve this goal is to give each member of the population an equal chance of inclusion. It needs to get more complicated than that only if you wish to oversample some minority segment. The purpose of oversampling is to make certain that you will have enough to allow you to generalize to that minority. For a study on race relations, for example, you might want equal numbers of minorities and nonminorities, even though the minorities are only 15 percent of the population. You can do that and still generalize to the population as a whole if you weight your oversample down to its proportionate size in the analysis. That is