Survey Research

• 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.