Articles
Market research
Market research is the process of systematically gathering, recording and analyzing data and information about customers, competitors and the market. Its uses include to help create a business plan, launch a new product or service, fine tune existing products and services, and expand into new markets. Market research can be used to determine which portion of the population will purchase a product/service, based on variables like age, gender, location and income level. Read more ....
Survey Design Questionnaire DesignQuestionnaires are an inexpensive way to gather data from a potentially large number of respondents. Often they are the only feasible way to reach a number of reviewers large enough to allow statistically analysis of the results. A well-designed questionnaire that is used effectively can gather information on both the overall performance of the test system as well as information on specific components of the system. If the questionnaire includes demographic questions on the participants, they can be used to correlate performance and satisfaction with the test system among different groups of users.
It is important to remember that a questionnaire should be viewed as a multi-stage process beginning with definition of the aspects to be examined and ending with interpretation of the results. Every step needs to be designed carefully because the final results are only as good as the weakest link in the questionnaire process. Although questionnaires may be cheap to administer compared to other data collection methods, they are every bit as expensive in terms of design time and interpretation... please read the complete article at the following link:
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/classes/cs6751_97_winter/Topics/quest-design/Sampling and surveying handbook
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/edref/smpl-srv.pdf
The science of asking questions
Research on the wording of survey questions flourished in the first two decades after the modern sample survey was invented, culminating in Stanley Payne's 1951 classic, The Art of Asking Questions. With the notable exception of research on acquiescence, attention to wording then waned over the next quarter of a century. In the past two decades, there has been a revival of interest by survey methodologists, who have drawn on and contributed to work by cognitive psychologists, conversation analysts, and others to lay a foundation for the science of asking survey questions.
The standardized survey interview is a distinct genre of interaction with unique rules, but it shares many features with ordinary interaction because social and conversational norms as well as processes of comprehension, memory, and the like are imported into the interview from the situations in which they were learned and practiced. As a result, contributions to the science of asking survey questions also enhance our understanding of other types of interviews and of social interaction in general—many processes can be studied “in surveys as in life” (Schuman & Ludwig 1983).
Methodologists have applied information-processing models from cognitive psychology to explain how questions are answered in survey interviews (Sirken et al. 1999, Sudman et al. 1996, Tourangeau et al. 2000), and these models have influenced much of the research that we review here. At the same time, there has been renewed attention to how the interviewer and respondent interact (Schaeffer & Maynard 1996, Maynard et al. 2002). There is an intricate relationship among the survey question as it appears in the questionnaire, the rules the interviewer is trained to follow, the cognitive processing of the participants, the interaction between the interviewer and respondent, and the quality of the resulting data. In an interviewer-administered survey, the question that appears on the screen or the page may be modified in the interaction that ultimately produces an answer, and in a self-administered survey, conventions learned in other social contexts may influence how a respondent interprets the questions presented (e.g., Schwarz 1994). Nevertheless, we proceed here as though the text of the question the respondent answers is the one that appears in the questionnaire, although in one section we review recent experiments that modify the traditional practices associated with standardization.Researchers must make a series of decisions when writing a survey question, and those decisions depend on what the question is about. Our review is structured around the decisions that must be made for two common types of survey questions: questions about events or behaviors and questions that ask for evaluations or attitudes. Although there are several other types of questions (e.g., about knowledge and sociodemographic characteristics), many survey questions are of one of these two types.
In some cases, research suggests an approach that should increase the reliability or validity of the resulting data, for example, labeling all the categories in a rating scale. In other cases, the literature only suggests how different design alternatives, such as using a checklist instead of an open question, lead to different results without clearly showing which approach is best or even clearly specifying what best means.
Researchers who compare different ways of asking standardized questions use various methods to evaluate the results. The traditional approach involves split-sample experiments, which sometimes include measures of reliability (split-half or over time) and validity (construct, convergent, or discriminant). Other approaches that have increasingly been used include cognitive evaluation or expert review, feedback obtained from respondents during cognitive interviews or debriefing questions, the results of coding the interaction between interviewers and respondents, and feedback from interviewers in debriefing sessions (see Testing and Evaluating Questions, below).
The interactional mode (interviewer or self-administered) and technological mode (computer or paper) influence the nature of both a survey's questions and the processes used to answer them. For example, a household roster may look different and be administered differently depending on whether it is implemented using a grid on paper or a more linear implementation on a computer (Moore & Moyer 1998, Fuchs 2002). Seeing the questions in a self-administered form rather than hearing them read by an interviewer, to take another example, may mitigate the effects of question order or make it easier for respondents to use the full range of categories in rating scales (Bishop et al. 1988, Ayidiya & McClendon 1990, Dillman & Mason 1984). Nevertheless, investigators face similar decisions regardless of the mode, and many of the topics we discuss have been examined in several modes.
Read the complete article at:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/eprint/rU4UOoizjrXROhijkRIS/full/10.1146/annurev.soc.29.110702.110112
