Surveys
Who is My Neighbor: Guides for Congregational Research
Grace Klinefelter, Zoe Parish, and Erica Collin, St. Olaf College
What is a survey?
Surveys are studies with many individuals to understand beliefs based on a series of questions to confirm or mitigate a hypothesis.
Survey Considerations
Sample size of research participants.
Response rate.
Research questions.
Hypotheses of research.
Types of Surveys
Face-to-face surveys.
Telephone surveys.
Self-administered surveys.
Internet surveys.
Survey Questions
Open-ended – refer to questions that allow research participants to answer in their own words, usually providing more details and specific answers.
Close-ended – refers to questions that allow research participants to answer based on given answers from researchers, usually limiting the individual information on a participant.
Double-barreled questions – refer to questions that have multiple questions in them. These kinds of questions are difficult because there are limitations in interpreting their answers.
Other Factors
Social pressure – Other individuals may influence a participant’s answers to seem politically ‘desirable’.
Accessibility – Considering accessibility is important in survey research because surveys usually include participants with higher incomes, access to telephones, or language sufficiency in only one dominant language, e.g. English (Engler 2011).
Hard-to-survey populations – Some participants are difficult to sample because they are hard to contact, complex to identify, or not interested in engaging in research (Khoury 2020, 510).
Example of Survey Research
This study is helpful to use to understand more about how to conduct survey research. In this study, Seibel and Haan compare the likelihood of contact and cooperation between older migrants (older than 50 years old) and younger migrants (between the ages of 16 to 49 years old) through survey research. For reaching older migrants, Seibel and Haan believed that letters would be the best form of communication for this study. While telephone and email surveying seemed less advantageous, it is important to note that migrants typically move more than native individuals, in other words, their addresses typically change quite a bit. They also considered the different language barriers, different mobility behavior, and different attitudes toward surveys. They found that the likelihood of contact and cooperation is dependent on participants’ attitudes toward survey research. For example, they mention that older migrants may view survey research as burdensome, so will be difficult to contact. However, older migrants also have a sense of civic duty that younger migrant generations do not have.
While congregational research focusing on immigrant communities will differ from this study, this is beneficial for understanding the nuances of survey research. It also clearly provides the steps needed for conducting survey research by beginning with a hypothesis rooted in research, contacting participants, conducting data through questionnaires, and finally interpreting the new data.
Read here for more information surrounding the study:
Seibel, Verena, and Marieke Haan. 2022. “Survey Research Among Older Migrants: Age-Related Differences in Contact and Cooperation.” The Gerontologist 62 (6): 842. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnac017.
Steps
Step One: Create a research question.
Step Two: Generate precise survey questions.
Step Three: Issue surveys to participants.
Step Four: Collect answers.
Step Five: Analyze final data.
Bibliography
Find more resources regarding survey research here.
Engler, Steven, and Michael Stausberg. 2011. The Routledge Handbook of Research Methods in the Study of Religion. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group, 395-420. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stolaf-ebooks/detail.action?docID=957447.
Khoury, Rana B. 2020. “Hard-to-Survey Populations and Respondent-Driven Sampling: Expanding the Political Science Toolbox.” Perspectives on Politics 18 (2): 509–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592719003864.
Moy, Patricia, and Joe Murphy. 2016. “Problems and Prospects in Survey Research.” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 93 (1): 16–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699016631108.
Case Study: Seibel, Verena, and Marieke Haan. 2022. “Survey Research Among Older Migrants: Age-Related Differences in Contact and Cooperation.” The Gerontologist 62 (6): 842. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnac017.