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Survey research and design in psychology/Lectures/Survey research

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Lecture 01: Survey research

Resource type: this resource contains a lecture or lecture notes.

This is the first lecture for the Survey research and design in psychology unit of study.

Outline

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This first part of this lecture presents an overview of the unit:

  1. Unit outline (key points)
  2. Assessment
    1. Survey admin guidelines

Surveys

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These surveys were designed for use by an undergraduate psychology class (Survey Research and Design in Psychology, 2005-2018):

Students used these surveys to collect data, entry data, and conduct analyses for a lab report.

Using these surveys

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These instruments and their items are free to use, adapt etcetera under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license.

However, be aware that the surveys in their current format are intentionally designed to not be "perfect" so that emerging scholars studying subjects such as "Survey research and design in psychology" can collect data and then practice exploratory factor analysis .

There is also intentionally no scoring key . Factor analysis is recommended to help determine the underlying factor structure and to identify which items to use to calculate composite scores. In other words, there is a latent structure, but you'll need to work it out. For example, for university student motivation, see these suggestions. Composite scores representing underlying constructs can then be used for descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing.

Psychometrics

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There are no reported psychometrics for newly developed items and scales in these survey instruments. Where intact, previously published measures were included, psychometrics may be available.

Users of these surveys should be prepared to conduct their own psychometric analyses (factor structure, reliability, and validity) based on their own samples.

See also

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  1. Website resources

The second part of this lecture presents an overview of, and introduction to, survey-based research in the social sciences:

  1. Readings
  2. Scientific paradigm
  3. Three main types of research - and their strengths and weaknesses
    1. Experimental
    2. Quasi-experimental
    3. Non-experimental
  4. Research purposes
    1. Information gathering
      1. Exploratory
      2. Descriptive
    2. Theory testing
      1. Explanatory
      2. Predictive
  5. History of survey research
  6. Survey research examples
  7. Survey research characteristics
  8. Examples of survey research
  9. Pros and cons of survey-based research
  10. Summary

Readings

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The combined readings for Module 1 (Lecture 1 and 2) are about survey research and survey design:

  1. Creative Research Systems (2009). Survey design: How to begin your survey project. Online article about designing surveys.
  2. Fowler, F. J., Jr. (2002). Designing questions to be good measures (Ch. 5). In In F. J. Fowler, Survey research methods (3rd ed.) (pp. 76-103). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. An excellent book chapter about how to write good survey questions. The best version is via UCLearn, but there are also some freely available versions:
    1. UCLearn reading list (Survey research and design section)
    2. Google Books (Note: pp. 80-81, 87-89, 91-92, 95, 97, 100-102 are missing)
    3. html (earlier version, full text)
  3. Howitt and Cramer (2014a):
    1. Chapter 29 - Statistics and the analysis of experiments (pp. 401-408)
    2. Chapter 34 - The analysis of a questionnaire / survey project (pp. 476-484)
  4. Nardi, P. M. (2006). Developing a questionnaire (Ch. 4). In Doing survey research: A guide to quantitative methods (2nd. ed.) (pp. 66-106). Boston, MA: Pearson. UCLearn reading list (Survey research and design section). Blog post.
  5. Trochim, W. M. K. (2006). Survey research. Online article about survey research.
  6. For more readings on this topic, see survey design readings

Slides

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See also

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