Surveys

Oftentimes in psychological studies, researchers want to collect information from their participants as quickly and easily as possible. Perhaps it’s the end of the semester and a professor wants to swiftly measure his honors students’ experience at college before they leave for summer break.

He can accomplish this goal by giving out a survey—a means of collecting data that requires participants to answer a set of questions. Depending on the circumstance, surveys can be administered verbally, as a pen-and-paper task, or by using an electronic device.

Surveys often include Likert scales—numbered scales that participants use to rate questions or statements. In the professor’s case, he may ask students to answer how much they agree or disagree with a statement like, “I’m unhappy with most of my classes,” on a continuum from 1—they strongly disagree—to 5—they strongly agree.

Now, technically, the professor is only administering the survey to a biased sample of his own students, which is known as convenience sampling—non-randomly recruiting research participants who are easily accessible.

As a result, he is limiting his ability to generalize the results to the population he’s interested in—all students at the college. Instead, he’ll only have the biased opinions of his own honors students.

Alternatively, he can use random sampling and give out surveys to randomly selected students across the population, say in different classes at the college. This way, every student will have an equal chance of participating in the study, and the large number of students who fill out his survey will actually be representative of the population he set out to measure.

A major limitation of surveys, inherent to self-reporting, is that participants can be dishonest in what they report. For example, although the surveys are anonymous, students may be wary of being completely truthful about their disappointment with their time at college.

Despite their limitations, surveys can provide researchers with the opportunity to capture the diversity within a given population.