Speaker 1: When you've finished creating your survey and selecting individuals to participate in your survey, you're going to have to make a few final decisions about how you're going to conduct that survey. There are different ways to administer your survey and you want to choose the correct one for your particular population of interest and the kinds of questions you're going to be asking. And also other considerations such as how much time and money you can spend on this project. There's four basic methods you could use. You could do in-person surveys where you walk around and you just talk to people. Or you could do more of like an interview style where you actually sit down and have a conversation with someone. Or you could do a telephone survey. I'm sure you've gotten many of those before where people just randomly call you and start asking you questions. You could do a mail survey where obviously you just create a paper survey and you distribute it randomly through the mail. Or you could do something that's becoming increasingly more popular nowadays that would be the use of an internet survey. This is when you get a survey in your email or you get a survey on a website that you've been browsing. And as I said, it's important to choose the correct method for those considerations I mentioned. You want to pick the right method for the people that you plan to collect data from. In-person surveys and interviews those are ideal for participants who cannot really read or write. So obviously it wouldn't make any sense to give them a paper or internet-based survey. Also this method is great for individuals who don't have a telephone. If you want to get data from younger people like children for example, then you're going to not be able to use telephone surveys either. So in-person surveys can be great for those particular populations. Another great reason to use an in-person survey is if you think you might want to follow up and ask more questions. It's great for clarifying responses and asking follow-up questions. But there are some drawbacks to in-person surveys. The presence of the researcher could bias the results. This could also happen in a telephone survey. Just knowing that somebody's on the other side of that phone could bias your results and make you respond in ways that are more socially desirable. Which is a nice way to say, lying to make yourself look good. But maybe the biggest problem with an in-person survey is that it's pretty time-consuming. When you personally talk to every single person and collect data from them on a one-on-one basis that's going to take a lot of time. So I wouldn't recommend this unless you believe that it is necessary for testing your hypothesis. Telephone surveys are considered generally superior because you can do this from the comfort of your own home or office and you can do it much more efficiently. You could employ a wide range of individuals to call and administer a standardized telephone survey. There are certain target demographics that this is especially useful for, like older people. Older individuals are more willing to talk to people on the phone. Nowadays these kids these days they don't use their phone for talking. They just click the little buttons and they send texts to each other, or Instagram pictures or whatever. But the point here is for certain populations telephone-based surveys can be quite useful. But as I already said, by knowing that somebody's on the other end of that phone that kind of interviewer bias could alter the person's responses. And just like an in-person survey this is going to be time-consuming and money-consuming, but typically it's a bit more efficient. If efficiency is very important for you, if you don't have a lot of time and money to collect data, you might want to go with a mail survey. This is good for people of all ages, but obviously they need to be able to read and write. If they have a home address and they can read and write they can participate in your survey. But this is going to be somewhat costly. You're going to have to pay for the printing, you're going to have to pay for the mailing, and you're also going to have to repay for the return mailing, the return shipping. But while it can cost a bit in that regard it's oftentimes cheaper than doing a telephone survey where you hire a large number of surveyors. You won't have to pay all these individuals. Another big benefit to doing a mail survey is that it's relatively simple and easy to create and distribute. If you can use a word processor you can create a survey and then just mail it out. But one of the biggest drawbacks to doing a mail survey is that it's very easy for people to just completely ignore it. It's people to just get this letter in the mail from some unknown address and just chuck it straight into the bin. Mail surveys significantly suffer from that non-response bias that I was talking about in the previous video. So, for all these reasons why these various methods are not so great, we've shifted largely to doing survey research online. Internet surveys are great for younger people. They're okay for older people. Older people are getting onto the internet at increasingly higher rates all the time. And this is also really good for collecting data from people who have time and money to spend online. So if you want to get a good chunk of the population an internet survey is going to be a good way to go. It's also incredibly quicker, incredibly cheaper, and incredibly easier to distribute than the other options. You don't have to print anything. You don't have to chip anything. You just type a few things into a website and you put that web link in an email and you just send out the email. You can just spam people your survey and some of them are going to respond and some of them won't respond. But depending on exactly how you engage those potential respondents you could get a lot of good data within minutes of submitting or distributing your survey. Another great thing about internet surveys is because it's basically just a computer program you can make that program adaptive. So you can customize the surveys for each individual participant based on information they put into it, like their name, and ethnicity, and prior history, and things like that. Or you can actually just have it change in response to their survey answer options that they've selected. So there's a lot of potential here for creating really interesting and really engaging survey experiences. So if this sounds like what you might want to do this is definitely what I would recommend. Whenever my students do survey research I always recommend that they do an internet-based survey for these reasons. If this is what you want to do I strongly recommend you use one of the most user-friendly and completely free services out there, and that's Google Forms. So Google Forms is free, it's easy, and as long as you have a Google account you have access to it. You can use this to create all kinds of surveys, even graded quizzes or tests. A lot of educators use Google software such as this for their classes, but one of my favorite features of Google Forms is that it will automatically collect data from your participants and compute statistics for you, and create visualizations of that data. So you're going to get pie charts, and bar graphs, and scatter plots, and all kinds of other data depending on what type of question it is that you put in the survey. And you can also view the raw data, just with a click of a button you can get a spreadsheet of every single answer that your participants gave to every single question. And then you can do the analysis yourself. You can compute your own statistics and create your own visualizations if you would like. So it's very user-friendly, it's very quick, it's very cheap. I mean obviously it's cheap, it's free. So I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't want to use this. And in fact I have created a tutorial video all about using Google Forms which I'm going to include in a link right over here. And if this sounds like something you want to do I strongly recommend you check that out.