Doing Sociology: Research Methods — Sociology STD 11 Humanities — Question

Survey: It is a systematic collection of facts about a defined social group. The term usually refers to data collections that employ both interviewing and sampling to produce quantitative date-sets, amenable to computer based analysis.

1. Sampling and interviewing are employed in many other research designs. It is the combination of the two that has led to the social survey or sample survey, becoming the most important single type of social research, used by all the social sciences, market research and opinion polls.
2. Surveys can be used to provide descriptive statistics for national, regional or local population; to examine the clustering of social phenomena; to identify the social location and characteristics of subgroups for more intensive follow-up case-study research and to analyse causal processes and test explanations.
3. In recent years sociological survey analysis has been greatly extended to include the sophisticated multivariate modelling techniques that are common in econometrics.
4. One of the main attractions of the sample survey for both policy research and theoretical research is its transparency and accountability, methods and procedures can be made visible and accessible to other parties, unlike research designs that depend heavily on the contribution of individual researchers. The key disadvantage is that surveys normally use structured questionnaires, which constrain an enquiry to paths fixed at the start of fieldwork.
5. Other criticism which are sometimes levelled at surveys are that numerical variables rarely provide adequate operationalization of sociological constructs; the highly asymmetric power relation between researcher and interviewee is detrimental to the quality of the data collected; they provide a false aura of objectivity which makes their result vulnerable to political manipulation.
6. Many of these criticisms can be overcome by good survey design and implementation.

Survey interviews may be personal, postal or conducted by telephone. Telephone surveys are particularly common.