Survey Research

    There are many components to making a good survey for research. First, one must choose an appropriate form for the question they are trying to answer. Open ended questions ask for the responders to come up with an answer on their own. Closed-ended questions provide possible answers for the person taking the survey. The questions on a survey must be clear so that respondents are able to understand what is being asked. The respondent must also be competent and willing to answer the question. It is also important to avoid questions that contain more than one topic because this can create problems with the results. When asking a question, it must be relevant to the research. Avoiding bias and negatives in a question helps the respondent by not leading them to answer differently than they normally would.

   My research question is if we give families engaging activities, will it improve family involvement? Specifically, I am interested in how socioeconomic status affects family involvement. I will operationalize my dependent variable using the question how involved was your family with this activity? I will then provide them a with a scale of 0-10, 0 being no involvement and 10 being a lot of family involvement. I will operationalize my independent variable by asking the question, what is your household income? I will provide them with a range of incomes from 90,000 dollars or more to less than 10,000 dollars. The questions I have chosen to use are good questions because they are clear and do not show any bias. Asking how involved the family was with the activities does not make the parents feel like they had anything to improve on, instead it allows them to comfortably answer how the activities went in the moment. This is good for the research because we are able to measure if the activities facilitated family involvement while making the respondent feel comfortable in answering that question. The question on income is also a good question because it is short and gets straight to the point. We will get results on the differences between different household incomes and family involvement.