Essentials of survey design and implementation Event

Topics include project management, quality, ethical and reporting issues; guidelines for understanding interviewer vs. self-completion implementation concerns; ways to minimise nonresponse before it happens; various issues in survey sampling and an introduction to weighting; principles of data coding and processing, and an introduction to the Survey Question Bank.

Course Objectives:

• To enable participants to understand the integrated processes of designing and conducting quantitative survey research projects.
• To give participants experience of grappling with problems in the design of surveys.
• To make participants aware of the main sources of error in the survey process and ways of detecting, controlling and minimising such error.

Course Content:
The course will cover the quantitative survey process from initial design through data processing (excluding the design of questionnaires which is covered in a separate course). Topics covered include:

• Planning, budgeting, timetabling and management of surveys
• Selecting a mode of data collection (e.g. face-to-face, telephone, postal, web)
• The role of the interviewer and how to do quantitative interviewing
• Implementing and monitoring self-completion surveys
• Calculating a response rate and ways to minimise nonresponse before it happens
• Basic principles of survey sampling: types of sample designs (probability and non-probability), sampling frames, sampling error, calculating sample size, and an introduction to weighting
• Principles of manual coding and editing of survey data, computer editing and preparing data for analysis
• Sources of non-sampling error in survey data, ways of assessing them and ways of minimising error
• Tips on report writing
• Relations with stakeholders in the sponsored survey process; issues in survey ethics
• An introduction to the Survey Question Bank

The course will have two strands. The first will consider the survey literature and the theoretical underpinnings of survey research. The second will examine survey research from a more informal and practical perspective. It will involve group discussions and tutored workshops and focus on those aspects of survey implementation that are often not taught in formal courses.

Target Audience:
The course is aimed at researchers, research managers and research students, including those who intend to design and execute quantitative surveys, those who specify and commission such surveys and those who analyse survey data and desire to understand the processes through which such data are generated, the errors to which they are prone and the meaning of survey "data quality".

Duration:
This is a 3 day course. The course begins at 10.00am on the first day (with registration and coffee from 9.30am) and ends at 5.00pm. On the 2nd day it runs from 9.30am to 5.00pm and on the 3rd day it runs from 9.30am to 4.30pm

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