Survey Question
Research Question: How can parental involvement encourage or stimulate children’s learning?
Operationalizing Dependent Variable: Does this project encourage the participation of future activities? (Circle one answer choice most relevant.)
- Yes
- No
- Maybe
- N/A
Operationalizing Independent Variable: How often do you communicate with your child/children’s teachers at Head Start? (Circle one answer choice on how often.)
- Daily or more
- Weekly
- Monthly
- Less than monthly
- Never
Our current research is being conducted to understand if sending home activities with children participating in Head Start are leading to overall more involvement with the parents at home. These questions will better help understand the demographic (Independent variable) of families at home. Asking the question of “How often do you communicate with your child/children’s parents at Head Start?” will better help us understand that demographic in their at home lives. While conducting a literature review, I had found numerous articles regarding the relationship with parents and their respective teachers to their children. This research showed that a strong relationship between parents and teachers, who often communicate, is a sign that the parent is more involved with their child at home than a parent who does not have a strong relationship with the child’s teacher. This survey question will help us understand which parents are most likely already involved with their children’s schoolwork at home.
Our survey question “Does this project encourage the participation of future activities?’’ helps us further understand if these activities helped parents get involved with their children’s learning. Using many different surveys, we can further understand which different activities are most beneficial in the encouragement of parental involvement, helping accomplish our goal of encouraging parents to get more involved to see if it will in turn benefit a children’s learning.
These are both well written and good questions because they are easily understandable questions. As a person conducting a survey it is crucial to make sure that the questions, we are giving are relevant to our research question while still being easy to comprehend as well as answer the question. Both of these survey questions are easily understandable with instructions on how to answer the question, while still giving us information relevant to our research question.
Some of the best practices while conducting survey research include opening with easily understandable questions that include large samples, original data, and measuring important things regarding the research that is being done. The best surveys make it: clear, make them relevant, make them formatted, uncluttered, sensitive to the problem, and demographic questions should always go at the end. Another one of the most important practices to do while conducting a survey is to pretest that survey, which means to have others not involved in the study go over your survey to make sure that it is following all the best practices listed above.