Introduction to Social Survey Methodology

Map Your Hazards!Combining Natural Hazards with Societal Issues

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Rules of Practice for Research

• Appropriate Questions• Ethics, Credibility, Reliability, Validity• Technique and Design• Proper Sampling• Pilot Testing• Analysis• Specific Purpose for Study– What are you trying to describe, explain or

explore?

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Appropriate Questions & Means• Collecting information about individuals:– Attitudes, ideas, beliefs, opinions, feelings,

background, behavior, orientations or plans for the future

• Questionnaires (Surveys) vs. Interviews

• Quantitative vs. Qualitative– Systematic and structured questions (closed)– Open-ended, more descriptive

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Ethics, Credibility, Validity, Reliability

• Ethics – Protect privacy of individuals, confidentiality, willingness to participate

• Credibility – Conveys purpose, how worthwhile it is, and who is responsible

• Validity – Data test hypothesis, measure what it claims to measure

• Reliability – Consistent measure and representative

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Population/Sample

• Who is your target population?• Identify representative sample and make

generalizations– Sample size: The larger the better. Good size is

between 100–250. Need at least 30 to be reliable (including interviews)

– Random: known chance of inclusion– Non-random measures:

• Snowball• Quota (street survey)• “Accidental” (student projects)

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Research Design• Relevance – What are you trying to discover (do

questions get at this)?• Comprehensiveness – What are the independent &

dependent variables? How do you classify? Is it clear?

• Aptness – Data that are readily coded and analyzed• Feasibility – Not too long or complicated• Unambiguous – Are the questions and categories

exhaustive and mutually exclusive?

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Question Formats

• Scales of measure (nominal, ordinal and interval)– Likert measures strength of motivations, attitudes,

opinions (e.g. Strongly Agree – Strongly Disagree)– Checklists, rankings, ratings and degrees of

importance (e.g. scale of 1–5)– Recurrent behavior (e.g. How often do you . . .)– Coded categories (e.g. yes/no, male/female)

• Including “DK” or “Other” as optional categories• Open-ended (categories must be mutually

exclusive)

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Pilot Study

• Must conduct a trial run with sample survey to verify the design and fine-tune the questions– Looking for bias, clarity and spuriousness

• Everyone (even seasoned social scientists) goes through this process– Otherwise you end up with a lousy survey that will

not get a good response

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Data Analysis

• What will the questions produce?• Discursive (summarize in words)• Graphs (bar charts of nominal and ordinal

variables)• Histograms (continuous and interval data)• Crosstabs (chi-square) • Multivariate analysis (optional)