ABSTRACT
The survey is probably the most common empirical research method in the social sciences and the humanities. It is a method designed to gather data about a human population (commonly referred to as a sample) through a sequence of focused questions. One distinguishing characteristic of the survey, according to Marsh (1982) and De Vaus (2011), concerns the form of its data: a structured set of data that forms a rectangle (or variable-by-case grid), in which rows usually represent cases (e.g., respondents, countries), columns represent variables (i.e., questions), and the cells contain information about a case’s attributes (e.g., respondents’ answers). Experiments and tests also use data in this form. The experimental method is different from the survey method in that with the former, “the variation between the attributes of people is created by intervention from an experimenter wanting to see if the intervention creates a difference” (De Vaus 2014: 5).
