Stress in Human’s

Survey Questions

 15-20 close-ended questions and, maybe, one open-ended question at the end in case there is something people want to say about your topic that they didn’t get to in answering your questions.
 Close-ended questions include things like multiple choice, true/false, yes/no, frequency scales, percentage scales, emotional rating scales
 Try not to lead your respondents toward a certain answer with the wording in your questions
 Make sure the wording in your questions is clear; test the questions on someone before distributing the survey
 Keep in mind that you’ll be using random sampling for the survey—the general population will be answering these questions
 Begin with “easier”, less loaded questions such as age, race, gender, where the respondent lives (if you think that’ll be useful info to you for answering your research question)
 Gradually build up to the more controversial or explosive questions
 If you have a question you think people will be hesitant about answering honestly, ask it a couple of different ways in different places on the survey

Interview Questions
 No more than 10 open-ended questions
 Design little follow-up questions if you think you’ll need to do more prodding to get the person to talk to you a lot
 The questions should not elicit yes or no answers; if they do, then you need to reword the question
 Avoid starting a question with “Do.” Instead, use how, why, or what.
 Interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone, or by email and shouldn’t last more than an hour in real time
 If you do the interview in person, make frequent eye contact, take notes or use a taperecorder
 Assure your subject of their anonymity in your research paper
 Choose someone who is an expert in your subject, which doesn’t always mean the person has a string of letters after his or her name

Survey/Interview People: Paper with multiple methods of data collection: Major parts of the paper
• Overview/Intro to the topic
• Thesis/Research Question
• Literature Review (summary of print sources)
• Description of methods:
 Sampling: convenience or random & why. # of people surveyed/interviewed
 Population: description of ages, ethnicity, info about background & experience* (explained in class)
 Research tools used to collect data: interviews, survey, focus group, observation
 How surveys were distributed/collected
 How people were approached for interviews—how interviews/focus group were set up and how done
 Description of observation site, how long, what did you pay attention to, how did you record observations?
• Presentation/Reporting of Data:
 Use of prose organized by question, pattern, subtopic
 Graphs, charts, tables, bulleted lists
 Either include questions in body of paper or as appendices—will depend on mode of organization for presenting data
• Analysis/Interpretation of data:
 Don’t repeat reporting of data
 Look at your data—what conclusions/findings can you come up w/ that will help you answer your research question?
 Patterns
 What does the data mean? What does it tell you?
 Surprises?
 Limitations of study
• End of paper: (don’t label it “end of paper”—you can put conclusion if you want)
 Your reflections as the researcher/writer
 Your personal opinions about this issue/phenomenon
 Suggestions for further research