In Sociology-345, Social Research and Program Evaluation myself and fellow classmates are working to conduct sociological research on student attitudes at Longwood University during COVID-19. The method of research we are using to collect data is survey research, specifically an online mixed methods survey titled “Attitudes towards changes related to COVID-19.” The best practices when conducting survey research includes providing clear instruction at the beginning of the survey, gaining consent from the participating individual, and making sure that participants know that their participation is voluntary. Ordering of questionnaires is important, open-ended questions should be placed at the beginning of the survey because simply people are lazy and by the end of the survey you have already biased their thinking through questioning. In crafting research questions you should take into mind people’s sensitivity to the problem and place more sensitive questions in the middle of the survey. Demographic survey questions meaning race,age, gender etc. should always be placed at the end of the survey. When you are done formulating and formatting your survey it is important to do a pretest to make sure the data you collect can be properly analyzed and make needed changes to the survey.
In this study each of my classmates are using this survey to answer our own research questions. My personal question is “What are student’s attitudes towards online learning at Longwood University?” My hypothesis is that students experiencing anxiety will have a negative attitude towards online learning. My independent variable is student anxiety and my dependent variable is online learning. In order to operationalize my independent variable, anxiety I will use the question “Would you say that you have felt more anxious during the COVID-19 pandemic?” participants can answer on a scale that gives insight into the source of anxiety. The responses are “Yes, because I’m worried about health issues”, “ Yes, because I’m worried about my education”, “Yes, because of both health issues and educational changes”, “No”, “I’m not sure”, and “maybe.” In order to operationalize my dependent variable I am using the question “On a scale from 0-10, how confident do you feel in your ability to succeed in an online learning environment?” the scale ranges from “Not Confident at all” to “Extremely Confident.” These are well written questions because they do not begin with negations, do not ask multiple or “double-barrelled” questions and the format of the questions allow individuals to give a scaled response. Anxiety specifically could be a sensitive issue for individuals so the questions placement in the middle of the survey reflects good well written survey format. The only edits I would suggest to our survey is to place more of the open ended questions closer to the top because I am afraid that people will not answer the open-ended questions at the end of the survey.