SOC 201 Chapter 6: Chapter 6.4
Document Summary
The idea of the survey is pretty straightforward: If you want to get answers to your questions, simply ask! More specifically, if your research question requires knowing who people are and/or what they think about something, the survey is a good method. More technically, a survey is a series of questions asked of a number of people. Sometimes we ask these questions orally, either face-to-face or over the phone. Other times, we give people the list of questions on paper and ask them to write their own answers. The first method is generally referred to as an interview; the second method is generally called a self-administered questionnaire. The survey method is popular in sociology because surveys are particularly suited to obtaining information from large numbers of people. Indeed, this capability to obtain data from large numbers of people is the main strength of the survey method.
