Doing a Survey

Surveys

Conducting a Survey

If you are going to conduct a survey, you need to work out a few things first:

• Work out what you want to find out.
• Write your questions.
• Decide who you are going to ask.
• Collect your data (ask your questions).
• Put all the results together.
• Work out how you're going to display your results.
• Write a report.

There's not much point in doing a survey if you aren't going to tell someone what you've found out. This is where displaying your results and writing a report comes in.

What do you want to find out?

Before you start writing or asking questions, you really need to work out what it is you want to find out, and why. What are you going to use your data to do once it is collected? Answering this question will help you to decide what questions to ask.

You might only want to find out something simple, like the most popular movie that's showing at the cinema at the moment, or you might need to find out something more complicated, like which times of the day the bus from Mount Colah to Hornsby is more crowded, and why. The first one might help you to decide which movie you should go and see next. The second one might help you to decide the time at which you will catch the bus.

For example, Gus the snail has a problem with caterpillars eating all the vegetables in his garden. He has a theory that if he plants only vegetables the caterpillars don't like, then the caterpillars will go to someone else's garden and stop bothering him. To test his theory, he needs to find out which vegetables the caterpillars don't like so that he knows what to plant. So, Gus knows what he wants to find out, and how he'll use the information once he's found it out. He's ready to write the questions for his survey.

Writing the Questions

You need to make sure that the questions you write are easy to answer.

If you want to find out something that's complicated, don't write a complicated question. It might be a better idea to write two or three simpler questions.

For example, Gus might want to ask the caterpillars "What is your favourite vegetable?" or "What is the vegetable you like the least?". He only wants to find out something simple, so he only needs one simple question.

Someone who wants to know about the times of the day when the buses are crowded might need to ask a number of different questions like: "How many empty sets are there on the 9 am bus?", "How many empty seats are there on the 11 am bus", and so on. To find out why the bus is so crowded at different times, they might need to ask questions like "When do you go to work on the bus?", "When do you use the bus to go shopping?", or "Why do you catch the bus?". Complicated data needs a series of questions.

Asking Your Questions

People don't always want to answer survey questions. Sometimes they're just too busy, and sometimes they find surveys boring. When you are recording the results from your survey, make sure you record the people who don't want to answer as having given "no response".

It helps to try and make the survey a bit more interesting for your respondents (the people who are answering your questions).

Sometimes, if you can explain how the results of a survey might help your respondents, it can make them more likely to answer your questions. It might also help to come up with a creative way of asking your questions. For example, you might get people to write their answers on a piece of paper and post it in a post box that you have made and decorated.

The way you ask your questions can actually change the results of your survey. For example, only certain types of people will respond to surveys on the computer.

Deciding who to ask

There are two choices here:

1. Ask everyone! This is called a census and may not always be possible for large groups.
2. Choose a small section of the population, called a sample, to ask.

Gus decides to do a census of the caterpillars in his garden. He's going to ask every single one of them what their favourite vegetable is.

Putting the Data Together

The first thing to do is to add up the number of each response that is given. This might involve using spreadsheets for more complicated surveys, or writing down tally marks for less complicated surveys.

Gus' survey is very simple. He's used tally marks to record his results as shown in the table below:

Can you see how Gus has arranged his tally marks into groups of \(5\)? He then totals up the groups of \(5\) to work out how many caterpillars have each vegetable as their favourite. To find out more about tally marks, have a look at the article on tally marks.

Displaying the Data

There are many different ways that you can display the data from a survey. The choices you make depend on how much data you have and what sort of data it is. To find out more, have a look at the article on displaying the results from a survey. For now, here's a quick summary of the different methods that are available.

Tables

If your data isn't very complicated, you can simply report the results in a table. Tables should have titles, and each column should have a heading so that people looking at the table are able to understand what the data in the table is showing.

Here's a table of the data collected from Gus' caterpillar survey:

Statistics

Statistics like the mean, maximum and minimum values, and standard deviation can be used to give you a summary of the results from survey.

For example, if you survey the people in your class to find out how old they are, it might be more meaningful to report a summary like this, rather than a list of exact ages:

Graphs

Graphs provide a useful way to summarise your data. They can make it easy to see the relative sizes of different categories, or they can highlight trends in your data.

Here are some of the graphs that Gus might use to display his data:

To find out more about displaying data, read the articles on displaying your data, bar charts and pictographs.

Write a report

Finally, you should write a report that talks about what you have found out, any conclusions you have drawn, and what action you have taken as a result of your survey.

Conclusion

So, you see, you can do your own surveys. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated computer equipment. Just a pencil and paper are more than enough. Why don't you think of some things you would like to know and go out and do your own surveys? Have fun!