Survey research is a useful way of obtaining information about people's opinions, attitudes, preferences, and behaviors simply by asking.
Surveys allow us to gather data about experiences, feelings, thoughts, and motives that are hard to observe directly.
Surveys can be particularly useful for collecting data on sensitive topics because they can be given anonymously, making it more likely that subjects will answer truthfully.
Survey data can be useful for making inferences about behavior, although they do not allow us to test hypotheses about causal relationships directly.
They are used in conjunction with many and many applications kinds of research designs in the field and in the laboratory.
Surveys allow us to gather large amounts of data efficiently.
Written questionnaires and face-to-face interviews are the two most common survey techniques in psychology research.
Questionnaires can be handed out or sent through the mail; sometimes, surveys are conducted by computer in the laboratory or via the Internet especially now in the new normal.
Interviews can be conducted face-to-face or over the telephone.
The generalizability of survey and interview results is determined largely by the procedures we use to select our subjects.