Due Date: Wednesday Jan. 21th [NOTE: you must have your survey available for pretest Friday Jan. 16th]
Type of Project: Individual
Focus of Project: Design, Test, and Analyze a survey.
Description:
You will pick a topic relevant to the vast majority of college students.
There is no need to make the topic specifically geared to college students,
but it must be one that a majority of college students have an opinion on.
A pre-test survey must be ready by Friday 16th, and your final results will
be due Jan. 21th.
The principal questions we are concerned with are:
1) Do your questions gauge the opinion you wish to guage?
2) What types of internal bias are there in your survey, and what is their
magnitude?
3) How reliable are your results? What steps could be taken to make your
results more reliable?
4. Would one expect certain bias due to demographic? Does such bias show up in the results to your survey?
The assignment has three parts:
a) An introduction explaining what topic you are doing your survey on, why you are doing your survey [that is, how would you hypothetically use the information from the survey], and why you choose it.
b) The pre-test of the survey [done in class]
c) An analysis of the results. What problems arose in the pre-test? How would you deal with these problems? What type of further pretesting would you after this initial one? What problems would you expect to encounter when you made a "real" survey that may not have shown up in the pre-test, and what adjustments might be needed accordingly?