Data Collection

Survey methodology is used to collect information about the population of interest by organising face-to-face interviews, telephonic conversations, internet or any other media source. Surveys are used to assess thoughts, feelings and opinions of people. The common research areas that require the use of this research methodology are social research and demography. 

When to conduct surveys?

Surveys are organised to collect new information about the experience of people for a particular event. These are benign to collect data that is not directly available in documents and does not allow of sufficient validity and reliability to meet research objectives. 

For example, you will conduct a survey if you want to analyse the experience of young children and their parents about the internet usage. You will randomly pick locations to take face-to-face interview of the fixed number of children (9 to 15-years-old) and their parents. 

When you have gathered information through a survey, your will arrange key findings in your thesis as follows:

• Online activities that children do – games, instant messaging, homework, uploading images, chats and blog writing
• Digital skills that they hone – developing search techniques, acute knowledge of apps and social media sites like privacy settings, blocking messages and finding website quality by comparison
• Parents concern about the internet use – violent content, provocative images, internet bullying, threats and harmful messages, personal data abuse and online skullduggery
• Parental restrictions on the internet use –  their guidance to children, their monitoring ways and the impact of their restrictions on children. 

Below is a snapshot of findings from another survey on attitudes and motivation toward English as the foreign language

When not to use surveys?

Here are the contraindications to the use of surveys.

• When recorded data exists
• A pre-existing survey exists
• The concept is ill-defined
• The sampling frame is not qualified

Conclusion

Survey methodology is the best tool to collect unobservable information such as human emotions and perspectives. However, you can use a mixed methodology that uses surveys and other data collection methods.

Most of the thesis are about primary data collection and usually to prove the authenticity of the data, a large amount of data has to be collected.  You will surely have to collect both qualitative as well as quantitative data.

Internet has come up to be one such boon for researchers, it gives one the opportunity  to connect thousands, millions of people sitting at one place and in that sense, there couldn’t be a better time for statistical research. If you are planning to use the net to collect data for your thesis, here are few things that can come to your help:

Generating an online survey:  the net gives you many options to generate surveys online. Options like Google forms or survey monkey are some of the options. However, if you want a more professional looking survey that is also not a very difficult job on the internet. Typeform is one such option that can help you to design a colourful and attractive survey.

Contacting people: if you wish to contact people as your respondents for your study you would need a large database of respondents. You can get information about people from social media or a blog. One very popular tool used on the internet is MailChimp. It is a place from where you can collect email addresses so you can contact them to participate in your survey. Not only this, to your surprise you can also manage your contacts through some special tools.

Creating a focus group: if your research is more qualitative in nature, you would need to create a focus group. It surely is a challenge to find a group of people together at the same time. Do not get into the hassle of streamlining the process through multiple email exchanges. Rather switch over to Doodle. It is a one place that would help you to coordinate everyone’s ability and also lets you know what the best time to meet them is.

Proposing incentives: researchers are aware that in the process of data collection some amount of incentive is important and leads to more high quality responses.  The internet gives you the option of rewarding people with some gift for sparing out time for you with I tunes download or perhaps some voucher from Amazon or any other similar site.

So now use the internet to your advantage because so far you are the most fortunate lot of researchers!!