Application Exercises

Chapter specific application exercises will help you think about research design in practice or have you explore a relevant resource.

Exercise 1: Survey Wording

Are you in favor of ____________? Yes / No

Fill in the blank in the above question with a topical or campus issue. Now take this basic question and rewrite it in multiple-choice, semantic differential, and Likert-type formats so that you are capturing more subtle responses to the questions. Check your wording carefully for any leading or double-barreled questions. Having written the questions, what questions can you identify that are unnecessary or that duplicate each other? What questions, if any, would you now eliminate, and why? Remember that there may be good reasons for keeping questions that appear to duplicate each other. What additional questions will you need to write in order to capture information about your respondents as well as their knowledge of the issue and their possible actions toward it?

Exercise 2: Survey Method

There are many ways of surveying campus communities ranging from “pencil and paper” survey forms to Internet-based surveys. List as many possible survey methods as you can think of. Many are outlined in this chapter, and under the discussion of sampling frames in Chapter 8. Which method or combination of methods would you recommend for running the survey you designed in Exercise 1 above? For your recommended method(s), identify the campus groups that are most and least likely to respond to your survey, based (a) on its delivery method and (b) on its content.

Exercise 3: Mobile Technologies

This chapter suggested that successful use of mobile technologies for surveys means that researchers must first successfully contact respondents and then present survey questions that will motivate respondents to begin the survey and continue with it until all questions have been answered honestly by all respondents. Assume that you need to survey your campus community on a contentious issue. How would you contact respondents in the mobile community? What incentives, if any, might entice them to begin—and complete—your survey? To minimize the break-off rate for cell phone, smartphone, and tablet users, how many questions do you think could be asked? What format(s) should they have?

Exercise 4: Survey Mode 

A Pew Research Center 2013 report on civic engagement in the digital age examined the extent to which Americans engage in political activity such as participating in a civic group or activity, contacting a government official, or engag­ing in social or political activity on a social networking site.

Survey data were obtained from telephone interviews conducted in English and Spanish by landline (1,353 respon­dents) and cell phone (900 respondents, including 469 without a landline phone). You can find the survey details, including many of the responses reported by age, education level, race/ethnicity, and household income, by searching the Pew website—www.pewinternet.org—for the report “Civic Engagement in the Digital Age.”

The survey found that, overall, 48% of adults directly take part in a civic group or activity. This figure is 36% for Hispanic respondents, 48% for non-Hispanic Blacks, and 50% for non-Hispanic Whites. This chapter has suggested that response mode (phone, mail, face-to-face, or online) can shape survey results because different types of respondents are associated with each mode. With this in mind, how might the above figures have changed if no cell phone respondents and only landline telephone respondents had been surveyed? To answer this question, you might want to review Cook (2014), cited below.