History of Survey Research Survey Surveys s repres represent ent one one of the most most commo common n types types of quanti quantitat tative ive,, social social scie scienc nce e rese resear arch ch.. In surv survey ey rese resear arch ch,, the the rese resear arch cher er sele select cts s a samp sample le of respondent respondents s from a populatio population n and administers administers a standardiz standardized ed questionn questionnaire aire to them. The questionnaire, or survey, can be a written document that is completed by the person being surveyed, an online questionnaire, a facetoface interview, or a telephone interview. !sing surveys, it is possible to collect data from large or small populations "sometimes referred to as the universe of a study#. $iff $iffer eren entt type types s of surv survey eys s are are actu actual ally ly comp compos osed ed of seve severa rall rese resear arch ch techniques, developed by a variety of disciplines. %or instance, interview began as a tool primarily for psychologists and anthropologists, while sampling got its start in the field of agricultural economics "&ngus and 'atona, ()*+, p. (*#. Survey research does not belong to any one field and it can be employed by almost any discipline. There are many types of survey research according to the modern era. Surveys come in a wide range of forms and can be distributed using a variety of media.
l rr e r ud a
A n e
o ed
Q
to
i r
uui
o
Io S
i s u
rrs
th
tt n
vv s e
o e
n
ep r ei "
n
o y e u
n s
s
n
a
e
i
r
s
G
r
r o
f wu
o
t
p
e
u
p-
r
r
v
v e
a u
i r
l v
e
i
s n
t
w
i
!
r
ee i r n
y M S
eo
/ m
i
e n
t
! o t ul i v l
ms
n
D
oa i rm
s i
!
There are several period of survey research from ()th century. hilosopher divided these terms in three divisions and named as The -ra of Inventions "()+ / ()0#, The -ra of -1pansion "()2 / ())# and The -ra of $esigned $ata Supplemented by 3rganic $ata "()) till resent#.
The -ra of Inventions "()+ / ()0# Sampling statisticians view the ()+/()0 period as the practical start of their profession. 4eyman5s article in ()+0 convincingly presented evidence that probability sampling offered biasfree estimates and measurable sampling errors. The sampling frames used for surveys in this era were often areabased. The initial frame thus offered complete "theoretical# coverage if every person could be associated uniquely to one and only one piece of land. The residence of the person "with lin6ing rules that attempted to define a single residence for each person# was used to assign people to geography. %inally, some surveys used telephone directories or membership7 subscriber lists, but these were limited to special populations or efforts that often abandoned both the desire for a universal frame and probability sampling. &s 8onverse "9)# notes, there were other developments that paralleled the statistical ones:those on the measurement side. Three streams of inquiry of the &merican public were gradually coming together. %irst, building on the ;;man in the street55 interviews, azarsfeld realized the power of measuring attitudes. The movement from qualitative unstructured interviews to structured questions fit both the era of mass assembly and measurement developments in psychology. >i6ert5s ()9) dissertation noted that practices in intelligence measurement could be applied to survey interviews, and the fivepoint scale was
The data collection modes were dominantly facetoface interviewing and mailed questionnaires, with telephone surveys entering the private sector companies toward the end of the era. The interviewer labour force tended to be female. -arly interviewers told stories of the care they e1ercised in travelling to remote sampling areas, ma6ing sure to visit a local minister5s home to see6 a place to stay, thus assuring the locals that the interviewer was not a ;;wor6ing woman55 of a type undesired by the local culture. 3n the nonresponse side of sample surveys, these were trul y the glory years. <hough there was concern about gaining the participation of reluctant respondents, few of the maeslie 'ish, circa ()A#. ?ith limited sampling frames and the dominant mode of data collection requiring facetoface presence, the number of surveys was small "relative to today#. The novelty of the event may have produced a beneficial curiosity on the part of selected persons, an increased perceived value based on its scarcity. It was during this era that all of the basic tools we use as a field were invented. Bany of the inventors have passed on, but my memory is that they shared an attribute of creativity and quic6 thin6ing, a pragmatism that eschewed theory when it did not solve practical problems. They were highenergy fol6s, broad thin6ers, believing that they were creating a tool for the betterment of society. I note that =allup and Rae5s early boo6, The ulse of $emocracy, made the case that the survey was a 6ey tool for hearing the voice of the people "in ()0#. &t about the same time, in a !.S. government publication, >i6ert noted that one of the ris6s of the increased size of the 4ew $eal government was that centralized bureaucrats would lose touch with the people:an unusually ideological statement in an official publication "()0#. His solution, presented after a few pages of ideology, was the
sample survey, destined to be an efficient way to 6eep the bureaucrats aware of the wishes of the populace. The sample survey also fit quite well with the rise of the consumer and service sectors. The need for a feedbac6 loop from products and services to ma1imize profit became an accepted ethic. Sample surveys filled the need. The organizational leadership of the field consisted of the intellectual inventors of the field. Scientists who created the methods and those who used the methods to study &merican society were ma6ing the 6ey decisions about the development of their organizations and the field itself.
The -ra of -1pansion "()2 / ())# This era saw the ubiquitous dissemination of the telephone as a communication medium:first in the homes of the rich, soon to the vast ma
"%reeman ()A+#. It was that sector that moved to telephone A20 =roves interviewing for onetime surveys faster than the scientific or government sector, which continued to have concerns about the coverage of the household population by telephone frames. The ()2s saw a large e1pansion of federal government funding of social programs, benefiting the social sciences. ?ith the rise of research funding in the social sciences, more and more sample surveys too6 place. Survey research centers grew throughout the country5s universities. The !niversity of Bichigan used the $etroit &rea Study, an annual sample survey of $etroit households, to teach many cohorts of graduate students the rudiments of the method. 3ther campuses launched similar training. Cecause the capital investment to conduct telephone surveys was low, many small companies and academic centers grew, almost all of them adopting some 8&TI software, on networ6ed personal computers toward the end of this era. =overnment surveys flourished during this time, permitting the growth of the federal contract sector of surveys "e.g., ?estat, Research Triangle Institute#. rivate sector surveys grew also, with increasing lin6age between customer survey statistics and management action. The government and academic sector "and through the Roper 8enter, the public opinion survey sector# made microdata available for secondary analysts. This archiving function permitted the rise of quantitative methods in many social science disciplines. Sample design remained an important function in large survey organizations in the government and academic sector, but the rise of the telephone survey reduced its role in many smaller organizations. Sample designs morphed from stratified element samples, to clusterbased sampling methods "?a6sberg ()DA#, and eventually to combinations of listed and unlisted number designs. rivate sector firms emerged to sell telephone samples to survey organizations, reducing the need for onsite sampling statistics talent within the survey organization. 3n the measurement side, this was the era when cognitive psychological theories of comprehension, memory, and processing were applied to question wording and questionnaire construction "Sudman, Cradburn, and Schwarz ())2#. This wor6 unloc6ed some of the mysteries of why small wording changes could
affect responses, under what circumstances the order of questions altered respondent behavior, and how conversational norms played a role in survey measurement error. This era also saw the increasing concern about response rates in household surveys, both within the profession and in public media "$ougherty ()D+E Rothenberg ())#. The telephone mode brought with it a set of norms that permitted respondents to easily terminate the interview "by ;;hanging up55 the phone#. Hence, the rate of ;;partial55 interviews rose, with attendant concerns about missing data on individual questions, and norms shifted to shorter instruments on the telephone relative to facetoface interviews. Increasing non response rates were not handled well in the framewor6 of direct estimates "e.g., means and totals incorporating case weights# and classical probability sampling. $espite this, the classical sampling te1ts used throughout this era "8ochran ()A0E 'ish ()2*E Hansen, Hurwitz, and Badow ()*+# suggest the use of poststratification weighting of cases for adower propensities to respond in the population led government and academic researchers to increase efforts to contact and persuade sample persons. Their costs began to s6yroc6et as a simple function of their response rates. rivate sector surveys, e1cept for those in the regulated media measurement domain, turned increasingly to placing quotas on socio demographic groups followed by postcollection weighting. The founders of the field entered their retirement years during this period. The new leadership was heterogeneous in their focus. In the academic sector, leadership sometimes moved from the scientists who invented the method to those who were more interested in the analysis of survey data. Small academic survey centers were
increasingly led by nonfaculty members. In this era, the founders of private sector survey companies were often replaced first by proteFgeFs and then by those more interested in growing the company than advancing the method. Banagement as a s6ill seemed to be increasingly valued in the government survey sector, as well.
()) to the resent:;;$esigned $ata55 Supplemented by ;;3rganic $ata55 ?alled subdivisions, loc6ed apartment buildings, telephone answering machines, telephone caller I$, and a host of other access impediments for survey researchers grew in this era. Response rates continued to deteriorate. Those household surveys devoted to high response rates e1perienced continuous inflation of costs due to increased effort to contact and interview the public. %acetoface interviews continued to decline in volume, often limited to the first wave of longitudinal surveys. The traditional telephone survey frames declined in coverage because of the rise of mobile phone numbersE the geographical location of a person became less well predicted by his7her telephone, as portability of numbers across areas was deregulated. Thus, local area studies on the phone faced new coverage error problems using such frames. $ata assemblers in the private sector offered address lists, partially based on the !.S. ostal Service lists. These permitted sample designs using area frames to reduce costs from listing of addresses at the last stage of sampling. They are also increasingly used in telephone sampling as au1iliary frames. Technology offered new communication media "e.g., mobile phones and the Internet#, which increasingly changed the daytoday lives of &mericans. In addition to sampling frame issues, the mobile phones appeared to be lin6ed to different user behavior. 8alleridentification features of mobile phones allowed people to screen out calls effortlessly. Since the mobile phone also lent itself to short but frequent interactions with others, longer telephone interviews appeared to be inappropriate to the medium. Bobile telephone response rates appeared to be lower than line telephone response rates "&&3R 9A#
The
rise of the
Internet reenergized research in selfadministered
instruments, with renewed vigor in studies of formatting and visual presentation "Redline and $illman 99E 8ouper 9A#. Cecause ?eb use was not universal, ?eb surveys were often combined with other mode sin multimode survey designs. Bailed correspondence with !R>s for ?eb response were sent to a sample from an area frame or address frames. Simultaneously, the assignment of phone numbers, especially mobile phone numbers, meant that the efficiency of using sampling frames based on the first si1 digits of the telephone number declined "Tuc6er, >ep6ows6i, and iercars6i 99#. Bobile phone numbers were most often lin6ed to individual people, not with full households, as with line phones. Regulations preventingtheuseofmachinedirecteddialingofmobilenumbersforcedrethin6ing of how interviewers accessed sample telephone numbers. The Internet offers very low perrespondent costs relative to other modesE it offers the same withininstrument consistency chec6s that 8&TI and 8&I offerE it offers the promise of questions enhanced with video contentE and it offers very, very fast turnaround of data records. ?hen timeliness and cost advantages are so clear, the problems of the absence of a sampling frame are ignored by those parts of the profession whose users demand fast, cheap statistics. It is unsurprising, therefore, that volunteer Internet panels arose as a tool. If clients want to ma1imize the number of data records per dollar under heavy time constraints, these designs are attractive. ?hile a data set from a poorly designed Internet panel may resemble that from the same questionnaire on a probability sample, and selection quotas assure balance on chosen sample attributes, results of the two methods often prove incomparable "Geager et al., 9((#. Relying on volunteering to generate a statistical microcosm of a large diverse population ignores all of the lessons of the first era of survey research. Such designs wor6 well until they don5tE there is little theory undergirding their 6ey features. The Internet and the technologies producing large databases, in addition, have an impact on data about the &merican public. ?e5re entering a world where data will be the cheapest commodity around, simply because society has created systems that automatically trac6 transactions of all sorts. %or e1ample, Internet search engines build data sets with every entryE Twitter generates tweet data
continuouslyE traffic cameras digitally count carsE scanners record purchasesE radio frequency identification "R%I$# tags feed databases on the movement of pac6ages and equipmentE and Internet sites capture and store mouse clic6s. 8ollectively, society is assembling data on massive amounts of its behaviors. Indeed, if you thin6 of these processes as an ecosystem, the ecosystem is selfmeasuring in increasingly broad scope. ?e might label these data as ;;organic,55 a nownatural feature of this ecosystem. However, information is produced from data by users. $ata streams have no meaning until they are used. The user finds meaning in data by bringing questions to the data and finding their answers in the data. &n old quip notes that a thousand mon6eys at typewriters will eventually produce the complete wor6s of Sha6espeare. "%or younger readers, typewriters were early wordprocessing hardware.# The mon6eys produce ;;data55 with every 6eystro6e. 3nly we, as ;;users,55 identify the Sha6espearean content. $ata without a user are merely the opes, and olson 9)#, which tries to predict the course of flu epidemics. ?e see the =oogle price inde1 "arian and 8hoi 9)# or the Cillion rices ro
"bpp.mit.edu#, both of which scrape price data from Internet sales sites to measure price inflation. Such data have near zero marginal cost in some cases and are always very timely relative to the events they measure.
