Surveys are one of the most common method of data collection in Social Science research. They are extremely popular in educational research as well as many other disciplines. They are tools or instruments that can be used to collect data on a large group of people in order to address one or more research questions. You have probably taken many surveys and are generally familiar with them.
For our purposes we are going to consider surveys built around the Likert Scale rather than those with more open ended questions. There are many books written about survey design and analyzing results. We are only going to do an overview of the topic here.
There are only so many ways of examining social phenomena. Essentially we can observe or ask questions. It is only through asking questions that we can explore the feelings, beliefs, motivation or attitudes of individuals. One way of asking questions is the survey.
Specifically, a survey is a technique for gathering information by asking questions of individuals that are the focus of your research. These individuals should form a representative sample of the population that you're interested in and the questions should be standardized. Surveys are convenient because they can be administered electronically, data is easily collected and it doesn't take as much time or personnel as something like an interview.
Let's say that you are studying "California college student attitudes and beliefs towards smoking cigarettes". You have decided to do a survey because you would like a lot of responses and you are interested in their attitudes and beliefs, two things that you can't measure by just observing. You would aim to survey students, as a population, because they are the focus of the research. The next step would be to find a representative sample. You wouldn't just find people smoking cigarettes and ask them, this could bias your sample. It is also not feasible to ask all college students in California how they feel about smoking. It might be possible though to survey a few hundred students.
Once you've collected the data from the proposed survey above you can aggregate it and begin your analysis. Your analysis will depend on the questions that you ask and the particular variables that you're investigating. We'll talk more about the Likert Scale on the next page. But first, check out this quick video about surveys.
Please watch this short, 4:44, video from the University of Amsterdam to learn more about surveys.
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