Survey Community Members and Participants
Conducting a survey is important to record the opinions of those who are going to be affected by what the survey is about. When surveying the community, it is important the survey that will be presented to them appeals to them in some way. There are different ways to survey the community such as going door to door, sending out letters, or even setting up a stand in a public area like a grocery store and appeal to the community there.
Hopefully, after reading the blog post about how to write surveys, you already have a survey that can be distributed. There are numerous ways to distribute your survey, but it is up to you how you want it to be distributed. It is best to consider whether you want to physically talk to people or have them fill out the survey. Both can be effective ways to collect data, but it depends on the purpose as to why you want to conduct the survey in the first place.
Essential Steps
There are some advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. For the oral approach, it is good that it is in the moment and that the participant is answering on the stop. If you do decide to go through with this, the best places to reach out to the community is places where will most likely go. For example, grocery stores or malls or even community events if there are any, are great places to reach out to people. However, this approach is not necessary if the survey questions are multiple choice based, or there is no purpose of them answering openly about their opinion. Also, some people are distant when they spot people advertising or wanting to convince people to buy or do something. While you may be only wanting to conduct a survey, your potential participants may see you as someone trying to advertise something.
If you feel conducting your survey through talking to people in public places doesn’t work, there is also the method of mailing it out to your participants. This can be beneficial to the surveyor because they can keep track of who they distributed their survey to and compare it against how many that responded back. This piece of information can be significant when analyzing the data collected. Participants are able to do it on their own time with not much pressure compared to if they were asked in person and would have to answer on the spot. This is very useful when your survey consists of multiple choice answers and the data you are collecting does not take into much account open-ended responses. On the other hand, the downside of this is that there is an uncertainty that those you sent the survey to will respond back. Also, you cannot assess the person you are surveying, meaning looking at their body language or listening to how they respond.
Takeaway
Both methods should be proceeded keeping these in mind. When conducting a survey, a difficult part of it is collecting enough data from participants in order to analyze and make a reasonable conclusion for it. If you plan on presenting your results, it is important to list any limitations or anything that may have affected your data you may have come across while doing this process. This can include that when the survey was mailed out, only a few responded back or if you talked to them in person, that their opinions were similar because they had a forthcoming outward personality. Specific information like that will help those who read your analysis keep in mind that that’s what happened during your process.