Surveys: Structure and Truth

Surveys work best when asking structured questions. Structure refers to the degree of control you want to exercise over the answers you will get. The questions may be either completely unstructured and vague or highly structured. The more structured the questions, the more participants are constrained to your predetermined answers. Therefore, you may be limiting their responses; they may have other things to say. On the other hand, having broad and exploratory questions as in interviews, may not be the best choice for surveys, as the data may unable to be summarized.  

Sometimes surveys are an unwise choice because respondents may find it difficult to answer accurately or truthfully. Perhaps the information you seek is hard to remember or too sensitive for people to be willing to reveal it to a stranger. It is often assumed that social desirability biases much survey research, meaning that respondents may answer questions to reflect what they think is socially appropriate rather than what they really believe or do. Racial beliefs and attitudes provide an example of this. In the second half of the 20^th century, the number of people answering national surveys in ways indicating they held a racial prejudice dropped rapidly compared to earlier surveys. Whether people were less prejudiced in the 1990s than in the 1950s is uncertain. However, it is clear that the behavior of respondents on the same survey questions dramatically changed.  

Next time I will post an updated blog index. Do you have an issue or a question that you would like me to discuss in a future post? Would you like to be a guest writer? Send me your ideas! leann.stadtlander@waldenu.edu