Survey Design

After completing the course, students are expected to be able to:

Knowledge:

• Explain key concepts in the survey literature
• Describe advantages and disadvantages of different data collection methods; discuss the strengths and weaknesses of face-to-face interviews, drawing on personal experiences with the used questionnaire
• Articulate personal assumptions underlying problem formulation and the formation of concepts, and critically reflect on them
• Understand fundamental research and sampling design
• Classify variables according to their levels of measurement and explain which descriptive statistics (mean, median, mode, etc.) are appropriate for each level
• Distinguish between theoretical and empirical hypotheses
• Reflect on key insights from the methodological literature in relation to one's own experience with data collection and analysis
• Explain the logic of non-response analysis and key concepts such as representativeness, population, sample, and analytical sample
• Discuss ethical considerations in relation to survey research

Skills:

• Justify the choice of a research topic with reference to societal relevance and/or sociological knowledge needs
• Formulate and justify a clear research question suitable for investigation using survey methods
• Identify and define relevant sociological concepts and construct simple models and hypotheses about relationships between them
• Formulate theoretical and empirical hypotheses and substantiate them with explicit assumptions about patterns in social reality
• Develop survey questions that operationalize theoretical concepts into empirical variables and argue for the selection of relevant dimensions in the operationalization process
• Pilot one's own survey questions and revise them accordingly
• Assess the validity and reliability of one’s own questions in light of analysis of the collected data
• Prepare data for analysis and carry out basic univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analyses using statistical software
• Conduct a non-response analysis of the analytical sample’s representativeness using known variables
• Discuss and contextualize analytical results in relation to the research question, prior understanding, and theoretical hypotheses; identify limitations and implications of the findings
• Discuss the strengths and limitations of the survey method based on personal experience
• Report the full process and results of the survey in a coherent whole, including communicating key results using tables and graphs

Competences:

• Independently and in collaboration with others, design and conduct a survey investigation from problem formulation to reporting, including basic data analysis using appropriate software
• Actively apply the methodological literature to justify decisions made during the research process and critically reflect on their consequences
• Communicate research results in written and oral formats, using tables and graphs
• Incorporate ethical considerations into the planning and analysis of the study