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Several Examples of Survey Research Reported Online

14 January 2006 28 views 3 Comments

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For my students. You will find below several examples of survey research. Each day there seem to be dozens of these reported in various periodicals online and in print. So, we will have plenty of examples to consider. Note the way they are reported in popular periodicals and later we will compare that with the way methodologies are reported in traditional research journals like Public Opinion Quarterly and other academic journals. The differences are quite remarkable.

Survey research is the theme for today’s links. All of the links that follow are good topics to consider for your blog posts. They range from consideration of methodologies used by Harris Interactive (at least what they tell us) to face-to-face tactics in homeless and interior design survey projects. The irony of those two topics (homeless issues and interior design) is not lost on me.  You will note that they used the face-to-face tactic to try and improve the quality of their results.

Please read them, research related stories and information, and write a simple 350-500 word post using the four simple areas of consideration we discussed before.

When you begin to write your thoughts on the articles below, consider (a) examining the examples of research – or what is passed off as research – and critique it, (b) identify best and worst practices, (c) look for transparency and evidence of methodology being clearly revealed, (d) critique the instrument (the questions, sample size, etc.) and (e) give a general analysis of the value of the research effort. What was learned? What may have been missed?

This is your first post. Consider some of the other points we have covered so far, like bias, sampling, phrasing of questions, and more. We have never done this before in a blog setting. I am just as interested in seeing how you take to this as you are likely anxious about undertaking it. It is your first try, so we will all be kind in our reading of your posts.

For good measure, there are a two journalism related articles at the bottom, too.

3 Comments »

  • Kami Huyse UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 1.5 said:

    What a great assignment. You are really teaching how to join the conversation by including links to real posts.

    The only thing I would add to the assignment is to be sure the students ping a trackback to the sites they reference in their blogs so that we can easily come to their site and add comments.

    There are some cool and free trackback sites they can use. One is Adam Kalsy’s Simple tracks at http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/. You can only do one at a time and you have to wait a few minutes between each one (to reduce trackback spamming), but it works for blogs that don’t support trackback.

    # 15 January 2006 at 10:10 pm
  • Robert UNITED STATES Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 1.5 said:

    Thanks, Kami. I agree and we will be doing that. I’ve already talked about linking back to the blogs they reference. Fortunately, the WordPress platform has a trackback section and even tries to seek out trackback possibilities on other blogs.

    I will share the Kalsey.com tools, too.

    Thank you for sharing that and please check out their blogs when you can. I’m posting a link to an aggregator of all their blogs (and a OPML file) for them, later on tonight.

    # 15 January 2006 at 10:19 pm
  • Where is My Mind? » “Do Not Call” a threat to survey research? UNITED STATES WordPress MU said:

    [...] Well…. clearly this was not going to happen, I just get a little over-creative sometimes. But I really did wonder how the system worked, and after reading Robert’s post with the link about how many Americans are on the “do not call” registry, I wondered if this would have an effect on survey researchers in public relations. [...]

    # 17 January 2006 at 4:25 pm