MAIN POINTS

Introduction

Survey research is an extremely useful approach to studying human behavior that is difficult to observe directly. There are four major methods used to elicit information from respondents: the mail questionnaire, the personal interview, the telephone interview, and the online survey.

Mail Questionnaire

The mail questionnaire is regarded as an impersonal survey method, and under certain conditions and for a number of research purposes, this technique is useful. Advantages include: lower cost, reduction in biasing error, greater anonymity, considered answers and consultations, and accessibility. Disadvantages include: simple questions are required, no opportunity for probe, no control over who completes the questionnaire, and a low response rate.

The difficulty of securing an acceptable response rate to mail questionnaires requires the use of various strategies that can be adopted to increase the rate of response, including sponsorship, inducements to respond, questionnaire formats and methods of mailing, cover letters, types of mailings, timing of mailings, follow up procedures like the total design method, and selection of respondents. The question of what constitutes an acceptable response rate cannot be easily answered.

Personal Interview

The personal interview is a face to face interpersonal role situation in which an interviewer asks respondents questions designed to obtain answers pertinent to the research hypotheses. The most structured form of interview is schedule structured, in which the questions, their wording, and their sequence are fixed and are identical for every respondent. The second basic form is the focused or nonscheduled structured interview, which takes place with respondents known to have been involved in a particular experience, refers to situations that have been analyzed prior to the interview, proceeds on the basis of an interview guide specifying topics related to the research hypotheses, and is focused on the subjective experiences regarding the situations under study. The least structured form of interviewing is the nonstructured or nondirective interview, where no prespecified set of questions is employed, the questions are not asked in a specified order, and no schedule is used.

Personal interviews are extremely effective when dealing with heterogeneous populations and when detailed information is required. Furthermore, they provide good control of the interview situation.

Telephone Interview

The telephone survey is characterized as a semipersonal method of collecting information. Until recently, this technique was regarded with great skepticism due to the risk of a serious sampling bias- that economically underprivileged people were unlikely to have telephones. Today, over 93 percent of the population have telephones, so this bias is minimized.

A technique known as random-digit dialing permits random sampling in a telephone survey, thus eliminating the problems inherent in using telephone directories (unlisted numbers, disconnected phones, and so on). One of the latest developments in telephone surveys is computer-assisted telephone interviewing. Recently, the telephone interview has become more popular among researchers due to the rising cost of personal interviews.

Telephone interviews are most advantageous in terms of their speed, a high response rate, and applicability to heterogeneous populations.

Online Surveys, Live Feeds, and Big Data

The Internet has revolutionized how data are generated, collected, and stored. Online surveys are one accessible starting point for understanding an ever-expanding digital landscape. Online surveys make it easy for researchers to design and implement surveys. They also have the ability to distribute surveys to anybody on the globe with an Internet connection instantly. However, Internet access across the globe is uneven, and varies with regards to national and local infrastructures. Ability to afford access is racially and internationally stratified. There are also concerns with self-selection of survey takers online, and recent research has also shown that Internet use is not a uniform phenomenon.

A live feed is a continuous stream of data in a specific data format that provides users, i.e., receivers and analysts of the data, with regular, sometimes continuous, information. The term big data is used to refer to data and data sets that are too large in terms of their size and/or complexity to be managed and analyzed by hand or conventional computer programs, and so require more advanced computing procedures for data storage, manipulation, and analysis.

Comparing the Four Survey Methods

Which survey method to use depends on which criteria are most significant to one's research objective. In recent years, online modes of survey data collection have significantly improved both the speed and geographic coverage of surveys. For many researchers, online surveys are and will continue to be the key mode of survey data collection in the future.