Activity & Process during Week 3A session.

Activity & Process during Week 3A session. 

Throughout the group discussion, I’ve learnt about what is a survey research at first as this is what I was responsible to read for the discussion. Survey research is basically a quantitative approach in which variables are measured using self-reports from a random sample of the population. For survey research, it has two important characteristics. Firstly, the variables, which are what the researchers want to know about, are measured using self-reports. Or in other words, they request from the respondents to report their thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. And the second important characteristic is that, most of the attention is paid to the issue of sampling, which is about the population that would take the survey. Researchers usually have a preference for large random samples because as they are not controlled as a particular population from a particular place, they would provide the most accurate estimates of what is true.

The next thing that I’ve observed is that, surveys may be long or even short, and they are conducted either in person, by telephone, through email, or even over the Internet. Not only that, surveys can be about anything from consumer preferences to voting intentions, literally anything that we could ask people and get answers from them. And after the surveys are conducted, they are usually analysed using statistics, but for some surveys, they can only be analysed using qualitative analysis.

It is found that most of the survey research is nonexperimental as it is basically just used to describe a single variable such as the percentage of people that support city lockdown during the pandemic, or even to assess the relationships between variables like how increment in salary can affect work performance. Some survey research can be experimental too, for example, one of the study carried out by Lerner and her colleagues, their manipulation of an independent variable, like anger versus fear, in order to assess its affect on a dependent variable (risk judgements), as this work of them is experimental.