The What, the Whom, and the Hows of Survey Research

Abstract

This issue of &dquo;Doing Research,&dquo; guest edited by John Sherblom, completes the first year of the Research Committee's column of &dquo;disciplinary talk,&dquo; the informal conversation about how we do research. During this first year, four guest editors, all members of the Research Committee, have collaborated with me and The Buzz Editor to develop columns on practical issues: gaining access to an organization as a research site (March issue, guest edited by Pris Rogers); investigating new kinds of communication---electronic mail (June issue, guest edited by Jim Porter); and finding models for qualitative studies (September issue, guest edited by Dorothy Winsor). The Research Committee invites your participation to help make &dquo;Doing Research&dquo; provocative and helpful to readers of The Bulletin. We hope to get your responses to the 1993 columns and your suggestions for fashioning this new informal discourse. Please contact me with your feedback, ideas for future columns, and offers or recommendations of guest editors and writers. (Although surveys have proliferated in business communication research, they have not always been well constructed, asked important questions, or had their results adequately interpreted to provide meaningful and substantive information. This column addresses five important questions that must be considered if the results of our surveys are to be significant and useful: 1. What do we want to know? 2. About whom do we want to know it? 3. How do we word the questions? 4. How do we elicit appropriate and adequate responses? 5. How do we interpret the results? WHAT DO WE WANT TO KNOW?&dquo;What do we want to know?&dquo; is a complex question that entails not only the specific information we want to obtain, but how we want to analyze that information and the use to which we want to put the results. These decisions must be made when we are designing the survey rather than after we have obtained the responses.

A Primer in Survey Research

“…Sherblom et al (1993) spoke for brevity when they stated that responses to mail surveys drop dramatically if the instrument takes more than 20 minutes to complete. They reported research studies that increased response rates by gaining management authorization for workers to complete a survey during working hours.…”

“…J. Sherblom et al (1993) enumerated five questions to answer to assure significant and useful study results:…”

“…However, Sherblom et al (1993) summed up the response rate issue: "A survey that is well designed, well-introduced, and one that stimulates respondents' perceptions of the value and importance of the research project will likely obtain the best overall response" (p. 60).…”

Designing Self-Reply Questionnaires to Survey Tourists: Issues and Guidelines for Researchers

“…The order in which questions are asked also influence responses (Crespi and Morris 1984; Sherblom et al 1993). A generally agreed pattern is that the order of questions should descend from easier, general questions to more specific complex ones and that personal questions such as those soliciting information on income, political beliefs or sexual preference should be left until last.…”

“…Payne 1951;Dillman 1978;Bradburn et al 1979;Belson 1981;Crespi and Morris 1984;Converse and Presser 1986;Oppenheim 1992;Plumb and Spyridakis 1992;Sherblom, Sullivan and Sherblom. 1993;Salant and Dillman 1994;Alreck and Settle 1995;Ryan 1995;Babbie 1995;Frazer and Lawley 2000).…”