Survey Research and Methodology

Comment

Comment by Abolfazl Hajizadegan on March 16, 2010 at 7:59am

"Zharfa Kavan Sabz" Research group is a corporation who recently has been founded to do the study and research project in Iran or elsewhere. This corporation consists of some young experts in so many different fields of study from literature to the sociology and from mathematics and statistics to physics. All the experts of ZHARFA are high-grade postgraduates from well-known universities of Iran.
Zharfa Kavan Sabz is registered under the number 370231 in Iranian Organization for Registration of Industrial and Non Commercial Corporations and acts under the Laws of Islamic Republic of Iran. The main office of ZHARFA is in Tehran. It enjoys the profession of more than 20 researches who all are equipped with all researches and studies requirements.
Zharfa Kavan Sabz teams work in three departments, i.e. Research Department (RD), Studies Department (SD), and Translation Department (TD), each under the management of the best researcher, best study expert, and best translator in the fields. The scope of the work of RD is theoretical and library based researches; the scope of the work of SD is survey studies and statistical analysis; and the scope of the work of TD is translation from Persian to other languages and vice versa. Of course theses scope will overlap each other in any project and all these departments will act as complementary to each other to deliver the best qualified and accurate research projects.
Zharfa Kavan Sabz welcomes all the research projects and will willingly do its bests to deliver any sort of such projects. The contact details of Managing Director of the Corporation are as follow:
Tel: +98 21 66 73 71 02
Mob: +98 912 40 10 381
Email: a_hajizadegan@yahoo.com

Comment by Peter Lynn on February 24, 2010 at 5:47pm

A new methodological study on reducing panel attrition, may be of interest to some: http://www.methodspace.com/profiles/blogs/experiments-with-methods-to?xg_source=activity

Comment by John F Hall on February 9, 2010 at 10:28am

For Bin Xu

Not quite sure what you want, but have a look at http://www.snapsurveys.com/research/banner/

Comment by Bin Xu on February 9, 2010 at 4:00am

I wonder if anyone can recommend a survey website. I tried surveymonkey, and it worked fine. But I want to know other options. the sample size would be around 1000, and the survey will be conducted in Chinese. Any suggestion or informaiton will be appreciated.

Comment by Matt Jans on February 2, 2010 at 12:49am

I'm just catching up on the posts listed here and saw one of John Hall's earlier comments about "sterile debates about design effect"...For every sterile and clinical statistical topic (though some might argue THAT label is biased) there is an engaging and thoughtful psychological/sociological discussion. For the stuff I'm personally interested in, design effects become "neighborhood effects" and "interviewer effects"...nonresponse bias corrections and psychological causes of nonresponse are another such pairing.

Thanks to Sarah for adding "Methodology" to the title. We're starting a movement here :)

Comment by John F Hall on January 14, 2010 at 1:58pm

I've just added to my website details of all four Quality of Life in Britain surveys conducted between 1971 and 1975 by Mark Abrams and John Hall of the SSRC Survey Unit. The abstracts contain details of content, sampling, fieldwork and available data files. The questionnaires are facsimiles of the actual questionnaires used in the field. The user manuals contain questionnaires, unweighted frequency counts on the raw data as well as technical information on fieldwork, sampling, coding, show-cards and interviewer instructions.

Link is http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/ssrc-survey-unit-quality-of-life-in-britain-surveys.html

Comment by John F Hall on January 8, 2010 at 11:07am

For Jack (2 below)

I'll try to provide some examples of the sort of thing I have in mind. I've just been asked to review a paper which has some interesting ideas on measuring power(lessness) as a determinant of decision making in various life domains. The questionnaire is one of the most unwieldy and cumbersome I have ever seen and clearly betrays a complete lack of survey experience or of consultation with survey practitioners, even though the text and bibliography refer to major surveys. This example used only a very small quota sample, but I dread to think of letting the authors loose on the general public.

Whilst question wording might find some previously asked questions, it's the technique that is needed. For instance, what is the point of asking for satisfaction with health services without also asking for recent (or ever) use of such services, as once happened in the British Social Attitudes series? There is also such a thing as respondent fatigue (demonstrated by reduced variance as the questionnaire gets longer and the questions more tiresome).

Comment by John F Hall on January 8, 2010 at 10:38am

To give you all some idea of where I'm coming from in survey research, check out:

http://independent.academia.edu/documents/0030/2631/In_Defence_of_Research_Units__Research_Training_and_Research_Careers.pdf

http://independent.academia.edu/JohnFHall/Papers/76926/Evidence-to-ESRC-Green-Paper-2001--1-

http://independent.academia.edu/JohnFHall/Papers/76928/Evidence-to-ESRC-Green-Paper-2001--2-

A great influence was working with the late Dr Mark Abrams at the SSRC Survey Unit (19870-76) and afterwards when he became external examiner to my new degree in social research at PNL. We worked together for many years, well into his retirement, and I was pleased when he agreed to give his name to the Mark Abrams Prize (awarded via the Social Research Association for the "best piece of work linking survey research, social theory and/or social policy") The peper we based the prize on is:

http://independent.academia.edu/JohnFHall/Papers/102595/Social-Surveys--Social-Theory-and-Social-Policy

The prize has not been awarded recently because there were too few entries or because they were of insufficient quality.

Details can be found for 2005 on http://www.the-sra.org.uk/mark_abrams.htm and for 2006 on: http://www.gsr.gov.uk/new_research/2006/articles/060801_sra.asp (for 2006)

Finally, I have uploaded a fair number of (not easily available if at all) documents from my time at SSRC and PNL (reports, papers, questionnaires, abstracts etc.) to my new website "Journeys in Survey Research"

http://surveyresearch.weebly.com/

Worth a look to see what us oldies have done. Even the more experienced of you may learn a thing or two. The site also contains extensive and detailed tutorials on data processing and analysing data from questionnaire surveys using SPSS for Windows. Feedback has been positive, but I need more.

All materials are freely downloadable.

Comment by Jack Kneeshaw on January 8, 2010 at 8:29am

Just a quick response to John (two below): We're working on a survey question database at www.surveynet.ac.uk/sqb/questions.asp that will allow users to find questions and then cross-reference them to the same/similar questions asked elsewhere/at other times (inc. cross-national surveys). Any input as to what that database should provide would be welcome (but comments received now would probably have to feed into the second release).

There are already a number of other question banks out there that do some nice things - see www.surveynet.ac.uk/sqb/qb/otherquestionbanks.asp. I'd like to think that our forthcoming survey question database will borrow the best features of these other resources.

Comment by Nuno Gonçalo Matias on January 7, 2010 at 8:33pm

Hi everyone. This is the first time I participate in this discussion forum. So a brief presentation: I am a PhD student of Sociology developing my research on social representations about water resources aiming at participatory water management.

My comment: I do believe that one aspect of John's comment is really important. I quote "Also useful would be a facility for distributing draft questions and/or questionnaires for comments and suggestions (and even pointers to the same questions in other surveys, especially older ones which may not be picked up by the Question Bank)."
From my perspective, this would be a really important/useful resource for anyone working and/or interest in survey research and methodology.

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next ›
• Page