Survey Design and Analysis
| Code | School | Level | Credits | Semesters |
| SOCI3043 | Sociology and Social Policy | 3 | 20 | Autumn UK |
- Code
- SOCI3043
- School
- Sociology and Social Policy
- Level
- 3
- Credits
- 20
- Semesters
- Autumn UK
Summary
In this module students have the opportunity to undertake a piece of empirical survey research. Students will together design questions for use in an online questionnaire. Students will decide on the topic(s) which the survey will ask about, and will design questions on a social science-related subject. There are two assessments. Students will separately analyse the resulting data and produce a written report on it as part of their assessment.
Target Students
Only available to Final Year UG students in the School of Sociology and Social Policy. Students taking this module are expected to be familiar with SPSS (or another statistic package, such as R or Stata). All of the teaching will rely on SPSS, but the classes assume little or no recent use of SPSS, and will cover basic frequencies, crosstabulation tables and t-tests (for which handout are made available) and may include some other analyses techniques if needed by individual students (such a factor analysis or regression modelling). If in doubt, students ought to make contact with the module convenor as early as possible.
Classes
This module is taught through computing workshops.
Assessment
- 40% Coursework 1: 1,000 words.
- 60% Coursework 2: 3,000 words.
Assessed by end of autumn semester
Educational Aims
Many students will go on to work in the broad fields of social, market or criminal justice research, either in the private, public or charitable sector, where designing and executing surveys is commonplace. This module will teach students how to develop a suitable research question, design survey questions, plan question routing, draft an online questionnaire that is appropriate to exploring that research question, analyse the resulting data and write a report about the research design and resulting analyses. The topics which students will design questions about will relate to any aspect of their studies (sociology, social policy or criminology), however the nature of close-ended survey question design means that the lessons they will learn can be easily transferred to other topics. Students will also gain an understanding of the research ethics inherent in survey questionnaire design (via a discussion of which topics they will not be allowed to ask) and practical insights into analysing and interpreting data. The module will help to improve students’ digital capabilities (see https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/educational-excellence/services/student-digital-capabilities.aspx ).Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete the module will be able to:
Design survey questions (including the response codes) and a whole (or part of) questionnaire for use with members of the public.
- Review the design of a survey question (or questions) and give an assessment of the quality of that question/s in terms of its quality.
- Design the routing of questions in a survey so that respondents are not asked questions they need not be (on the basis of prior answers) and are asked questions in a logical manner.
- Analyse (both in terms of basic report as well as inferential statistic) data from the survey which they will have designed using SPSS.
- Be able to write a report which critically reflects on their research design, survey methodology, analyses, results and what can be inferred from this.
- Will be familiar with analysis techniques up to and including: basic frequencies; crosstabulation; multiple regression (both linear and logistic); factor analyses.