2. The basic component of surveys consists of QUESTIONS THAT PEOPLE ANSWER however sampling and analysis are also fundamental parts of survey research

3. Arguably the most popular data collective strategy in the social sciences

6. “Olympics” does this include the para-olympics?

7. “Vancouver” Vancouver people? Greater Vancouver? British Columbia? Canada?

8. Is the meaning/interpretation affected or dependent upon previous questions? (i.e. if all the questions before this question dealt with the homelessness problem in Vancouver would they affect the answer?

9. Information Processing

10. Is respondent being asked to think about actual experience or hypothetical situations?

11. Retrieving/constructing responses

12. Memory

13. Mental capacity

15. Forward telescoping – talking about events that occurred before Jan. 1 acting like they did happen after jan1

18. Reporting answer

19. Social and conversational norms (e.g. social desirability- many will not disclose that they might think that would make them look bad)

21. Emailed- Telephone

24. Describes the study

27. How/where/when to return completed questionnaire

29. Inducements to participate (awards, token of appreciation, being entered into draws)

30. Characteristic of respondents (group member/non member, age, gender, ethnicity, social class)

31. Mailing date

32. Follow-up procedures (reminder letter, additional letter and fresh questionnaire, telephone call!!!) got to do a lot of work to get the most and best responses possible

34. Locate and enlist cooperation of respondents

35. Conduct “good” interview

36. Motivate respondent

37. Answer questions/clarify confusion

38. Using PROBES to elicit address information

39. Accurately recording information (not easy)

40. Training of interviewers (must include)

41. Knowing key aspects of study (objectives, sponsors, sampling strategy etc.)

43. Use of computers (CATI – computer assisted telephone interviews)

44. Random digit dialling

45. Standardized script (present interviewer with everything he or she will say and they’ll read the script) allow you to build in an enormous amount of complexity in the script that not even the interviewer can screw up. For example, if you’re asking if someone has been a victim of a crime or not, depending on the answer, it’ll send the questions to a different part of the script

47. Some see this as the GOLD standard for survey research because of the high quality data that can be generated

50. In questionnaire the people who can read and write and understand correctly will give much better responses

52. Changing the word order of questions (HAVE YOU EVER COMMITED SUICIDE)

53. Adding words to questions (you haven’t committed suicide, have you?)

54. Forcing answers (calling someone a liar)

55. Recording errors (e.g. making up answers by the interviewer)

56. Interviewer characteristics

57. Race/ethnicity (same race as the interviewee or different)

58. Gender ( male interviewing females on sexual assault)

59. Age (young person asking old person about some questions)

62. Yes- go to next question

63. How many times?

64. 1 or 2 times1

65. 3 or 4 times2

67. Keep the questions short

68. Avoid double barrelled questions

69. Asking two questions as one question (i.e. do you think the police do a good job in informing the public and enforcing the law?)

70. Avoid hypothetical questions (poor predictors of actual behaviour/experiences)

71. Don’t push the limits of what people can remember (how did you feel over the past year? Happy, sad etc)

72. Avoid negative questions

73. Ie. The police should not carry guns? Agree/disagree

74. Response categories must be mutually exclusive

75. Response categories must be exhaustive

76. Avoid leading questions (wording that encourages the respondent to answer in a particular way)

78. questions of major research interest next

81. Basic approach is to ask individuals about disreputable behaviour

82. First published findings of self report surveys in mind 1940’s

83. James Short and Ivan Nye (1957) carry out first methodologically sophisticated survey

84. Used scale construction, assessed measurement reliability and validity, probability sampling

88. Internal consistency of items (more complex version of splitting techniques)

89. But should we expect items to correlate?

91. Construct validity – measures shown to correlate with socio-demographic variables in theoretically expected ways

92. Criterion validity – comparison (delinquency of a respondent)

93. self report measures – official records

94. self report measures – report by friends/classmates

98. 1966-1967 large scale victim surveys started taking place in US

99. Canadian urban victimization survey 1981 (URBAN survey, all participants in 1 of 8 countries in Canada)

100. General social survey 1988, 1993, 1999, 2004 (5 year increments)

101. Violence against women survey 1993

102. ** All done by statistics Canada, done by telephone (CATI), excludes territories

103. Like self report offender surveys, victim surveys attempt to measure crime events reported and not reported to the police (dark figure)

104. Historically, have provided more detailed info (info about victim, offender, circumstances surrounding event) than UCR data – but this has changed since late 1980s

105. UCR data criticized for giving very limited data about crime ( # of homicides, charges, males/females etc) and are monthly totals (aggregate data) , don’t know if people are done more than one offences. Very little information relating to the offender

106. Now asked more (age of offender, were the people involved drinking, circumstances of situation, etc)Victim surveys have led to creation of new victim-centered theories (routine activities, lifestyle, opportunity, rational choice, repeat victimization)