An Introduction to Survey Research

CHAPTER 7

Carrying Out the Survey

So far we have talked about a number of different aspects of doing a survey including:

•How to select the cases for your survey (Chapter 2);

•The different types of error that can occur in a survey (Chapter 3);

•Things you need to think about when planning a survey (Chapter 4);

•Different ways of delivering the survey to your sample (Chapter 5); and

•Writing good questions (Chapter 6).

In this chapter, we’re going to talk about how you carry out the survey. We’re not going to get into the nuts and bolts of doing a survey. There are lots of good books that will do this and we’ll mention them in the annotated bibliography at the end of this chapter. Rather we’re going to describe the steps that every researcher ...