ABSTRACT
The resources available The third important factor in designing and planning a survey is the financial cost. Sample surveys are labourintensive (see Davidson, 1970), the largest single expenditure being the fieldwork where costs arise out of the interviewing time, travel time and transport claims of the interviewers themselves. There are additional demands on the survey budget. Training and supervising the panel of interviewers can often be as expensive as the costs incurred during the time that they actually spend in the field. Questionnaire construction, piloting, printing, posting, coding, together with computer programming – all eat into financial resources. Proposals from intending education researchers seeking governmental or private funding are often weakest in the amount of time and thought devoted to a detailed planning of the financial implications of the projected enquiries. (In this chapter we confine ourselves from this point to a discussion of surveys based on self-completion questionnaires. A full account of the interview as a research technique is given in Chapter 21.)
1 Will the researcher be completing the survey by entering data, or will the participants be selfadministering the survey?
