ABSTRACT
This chapter provides information on designing, conducting, and reporting on survey research. Surveys can provide data on characteristics, behaviors, and attitudes. As with any rigorous research, researchers need a plan to ensure that they operationalize their research questions and collect valid and reliable data. Researchers must define their population and select their sample carefully, making sure that the sample can be generalized to the larger population. Next, researchers must construct their questions so that they operationalize the study’s guiding research question(s). The five types of survey questions are open-ended, closed-ended, multiple-choice, rating, and ranking. Next, researchers must pilot the survey as many times as needed to ensure its reliability, and finally, calculate response rate, margin of error, and confidence intervals to assess the claims that they can reliably make with the data.
