social surveys Flashcards
what is meant by a survey ?
a survey is a means of collecting primary data from large numbers of people in a standardised, quantitive, statistical form like questionnaires and structured interviews.
what is the biggest survey
the census
how do researchers choose a topic ?
a topic may be chosen because; a researchers own personal interest, current topics, or what they can get funding for.
how do they determine the aim/ hypothesis ?
aim- what they want to find out
hypothesis- what they think they’ll find.
how do they operationalise concepts
operationalising concepts. this is when a concept ( an abstract or social idea/ theory e.g social class) is converted into something measurable so it can be used in social research.
e.g asking someone If they’re middle class, you would instead ask how many bedrooms( spare rooms) they have and how many people share their one address.
how would a researcher define survey population and draw up a sampling frame?
research/ survey population : the whole group being studied, this is derived from the hypothesis.
e.g. how labelling affects people at school.
the researcher, has to ensure the group is representative because the small group represent the larger group can be generalised to the research population.
what is a sampling frame ?
sampling frame: a list of names of allmthose known to be included in the research/ survey population, commonly the electoral role is used or lists of patents at a doctors surgery.
what’s a representative sample ?
a representative sample is a group from the survey population.
who are the respondents ?
the people who accurately complete and return the questionnaires.
how would researchers decide on a sampling size and sampling method ?
to determine the sampling size the researcher would have to make sure that the amount of people were accurately represented. They would also have to determine if the survey was accurate
what’s random sampling ?
e.g picking names out of a hat.
in random sampling everyone in the population has the same chance of being chosen. this is easy because its quick and can be picked by the computer. because its down to chance, people can be missed leading to it not being representative.
what is systematic sampling ?
e.g an example of systematic sampling would be picking every 10th person. This carries the same risk of being unrepresentative as random sampling as every 10th person could be a girl.
what’s stratified random sampling ?
This method attempts to make the sample as representative as possible, avoiding the problems that could be caused by using a completely random sample. to do this the sample frame will be divided into a a number of smaller group, such as social classes, age, gender, ect
what is quota sampling ?
in this method researchers will be told to ensure the sample fits with certain quotas.
what is multistage sampling ?
this is taking a random sample at various stages of the sampling process.
e.g. you might look at a random county, take random schools from this random county and take random pupils from this school to find your sample.
