Survey Instruments
Gathering Geographic Data Using Surveys
Introduction: Surveys can be a wonderful data gathering instruments. There are people who make careers out of survey research. Major political and business decisions are regularly based on survey responses. However, it's generally not a good idea for students to attempt survey based research in a 15 week semester course. There are a lot of challenges with survey research that make the process very challenging.
Several reasons stand out in my mind as major impediments to doing quick, quality surveys.
1. Surveys need to be beta (or road) tested before they can be judged reliable. It's amazing how very often a survey question that seems straight forward elicits unexpected answers from respondents. This is a by product of our inability to anticipate the wide variety of interpretations of even simple questions or even common words. Without testing, surveys often wind up collecting a pile of junk data. Testing survey instruments takes time, often more than students have in a 15 week semester.
2. Surveys almost always suffer from poor response rates and biased samples when administered by students. To be brutally honest, most "random" respondents do not have the time or interest or human decency to help a college student out by answering a questionaire or survey. Because the gathering of opinions has become big business (elections, marketing campaigns, academic research), we as a society are bombarded by telemarkters, pop up surveys on web sites, etc. Many people just tune this stuff out now.
Take a look at a piece of survey research I tried a few years back. I tested it on a small group and worked on this for a great deal of time, but after I sent it out to some 2,500 mayors and city managers across the United States, I got back only about 11 responses. ALMOST NOBODY cared enough about a life and death issue like tornado safety to respond to this research effort. I speculate that others were afraid of the liability my survey may have created for them. In other words, this survey may have exposed the fact that they were a) aware of the dangers posed by tornados and b) had done nothing to prepare for them. My timing may have been bad as well. I sent this out after Hurricane Katrina. Several that did respond, filled out the information so poorly that it was unusable. A handful of repsondents were so clearly unaware of the danger that tornados posed to their city ("Tornados do not hit urban areas, so we are not threatened by them"), that I realized that the logic that drove forth the survey was undercut by the dangerous ignorance of elected officials or their appointees.
3. Interpreting the results requires some minimal skills in statistical analysis and the software if the survey instrument is simplistic; featuring yes/no or likert scale questions. Interpreting open ended questions can be very challenging for students that haven't had an entire course on qualitative data analysis.
So the moral of the story is: don't underestimate the challenges associated with survey research. KEEP IN MIND - There's loads of data already out there that can be used to answer interesting research questions, so FIND THE DATA FIRST, THEN ASK QUESTIONS OF THE DATA. Avoid creating your own data, if you can help it, unless you have plenty of time.
If you want to include survey research in your Geography 490 capstone research paper, please contact me or another faculty in the semester PRIOR to your enrollment in Geography 490. With a bit of a head-start, you may be able to use survey research successfully.
Objectives:
Student will demonstrate their ability to comprehend a short research article, offer a simple critique of a survey instrument and develop their own short survey instrument..
Tasks:
Your task is threefold (maybe fourfold). You need to read the cautionary paragraphs above, find and read the Sims and Baumann article discussed below, answer a few quesitons over these readings, and construct a short-one page survey of your own in which you query fellow students about their choice of major.
Readings:
1) John H. Sims and Duane D. Baumann. 1972. Science, The Tornado Threat: Coping Styles of the North and South. (176:4042) pp. 1386-1392.
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You should be able to locate the Sims & Baumann article on your own. The Oviatt Library has it on-line. It's easy to find if you paid attention to the library lab.
- The paper by Sims and Baumann suggests that the reason more people in the Deep South die in tornados than people in the Midwest is that Southerners are more bound by fatalistic attitudes toward natural events, perhaps stemming from their deep religious convictions and regional orientation toward teleology. This fatalism may inhibit Southerners from preparing for natural disasters the way Midwesterners might.
The paper is about five pages long. Focus on their survey instrument, which they begin to describe on the bottom of page 1388 (fourth page of the article).
2) Dr. Graves' Tornado Hazard Perception Survey
3) Chapter 6 (Sara McLafferty) in Key Methods in Geography.
Response Table:
In the form below, demonstrate your comprehension of the information presented above and in the readings to answer the questions below.
Chose the letter from the drop down menu of choices in the Response Options column that corresponds to the best answer in the Questions and Answer Options column.
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