How To Conduct Surveys

Book excerpt: Popular for helping readers to organize a rigorous survey and evaluate the credibility of other ones by giving them practical, step-by-step advice, the Second Edition of this book now also covers: computer-assisted and interactive surveys and how they contrast with telephone and face-to-face surveys; guidelines for preparing informed consent statements for survey respondents; ways to ensure the sample you have is large enough to detect a difference between groups (if one exists); ways to ask questions about ethnicity; how to read computer output containing survey results; how to prepare a structured abstract of a survey report; new survey data analysis techniques, such as odds ratios, relative risks, and confidence intervals as well as sampling techniques, such as snowball sampling; and guidelines for preparing overheads and slides to report survey results with illustrations of how an oral presentation of survey results differs from a written one.