Deck 8: Survey Research

Question 1

Surveys can be used for all the following except

A) as a dependent measure in experimental research
B) to find out why people do things
C) to assess people's attitudes
D) to identify relationships among variables

Answer 1

to find out why people do things

Question 2

Which of the following should NOT be a goal of survey research?

A) description
B) explanation
C) prediction
D) a and b

Answer 2

explanation

Question 3

Which of the following is NOT good advice?

A) have a hypothesis before you write a survey
B) focus on writing questions based on your hypothesis
C) ask people why they behaved a certain way
D) determine what analyses you plan to do before administering the survey

Answer 3

ask people why they behaved a certain way

Question 4

Which of the following will probably NOT lead to invalid answers to your questions?

A) asking extremely personal questions
B) allowing participants to say that they don't know the answer
C) asking participants why they behaved a certain way
D) asking for retrospective self-reports

Question 5

From which of the following questions are you likely to get an accurate answer?

A) "Why did you think of that?"
B) "How much did you study last week?"
C) "What is your current attitude toward China?
D) "How much did you give to charity last year?"

Question 6

From which of the following questions are you likely to get an accurate answer?

A) "Have you cheated on your taxes?"
B) "Did you enjoy participating in my study?"
C) "What would you do if someone tried to mug you?"
D) None of the above

Question 7

If you conduct a mail survey, you can

A) safely generalize your results to the population if you mailed the questionnaire to everyone in the population
B) safely generalize your results to the population if you mailed the questionnaire to a random sample of members of the population
C) probably can't generalize your results to the population because of nonresponse bias, no matter who you sent the questionnaire to
D) a and b

Question 8

Nonresponse bias harms the survey's

A) construct validity
B) external validity
C) internal validity
D) both b and c

Question 9

Questionnaires are generally ________ than face-to-face interviews.

A) less expensive
B) less anonymous
C) more representative of the population because of their high return rate
D) easier for the respondents to understand

Question 10

Which of the following statements are FALSE?

A) investigator-administered questionnaires have higher response rates than self- administered questionnaires
B) because of the lack of anonymity, investigator-administered questionnaires may elicit less honest responses than self-administered questionnaires
C) investigator-administered questionnaires are more expensive than self- administered
D) none of the above--investigator-administered questionnaires differ from self-administered questionnaires in all these respects

Question 11

Nonresponse bias is the biggest problem for

A) self-administered questionnaires
B) investigator-administered questionnaires
C) personal interviews
D) telephone interviews

Question 12

Which of the following is NOT a consequence of the greater interaction with respondents afforded by the personal interview?

A) greater social desirability bias
B) greater interviewer bias
C) greater sampling bias
D) greater ability to clarify questions

Question 13

As compared to personal interviews, telephone interviews

A) have higher response rates
B) are less vulnerable to demand characteristics, such as giving answers that please the interviewer
C) can better control interviewer bias
D) all of above

Question 14

Which of the following is true?

A) the telephone survey takes less time than the personal interview
B) the telephone survey is less vulnerable to interviewer bias than the personal interview
C) the telephone survey is less vulnerable to demand characteristics than the personal interview
D) all of the above

Question 15

Which of the following is NOT a fixed alternative question?

A) a true/false question
B) a multiple-choice question
C) a rating scale question
D) an essay question

Question 16

Which of the following is not a nominal question?

A) "Are you employed?"
B) "What is your race?"
C) " Rate how favorably you feel toward animal research on a five-point scale?"
D) "Are you for or against animal research? (circle either "for" or "against")"

Question 17

Which of the following is not true of a nominal/dichotomous question?

A) they are easy for participants to answer
B) they are easy for researchers to score
C) they help the study's statistical power
D) they provide qualitative data

Question 18

As opposed to open-ended questions, fixed alternative questions are

A) easier for the participant to answer
B) easier to score
C) both a and b
D) neither a nor b

Question 19

A major disadvantage of Likert-type questions is

A) they provide nominal data
B) they are not fixed alternative items
C) respondents may feel that they have been forced into an answer that doesn't reflect their true position.
D) They provide data that can't be analyzed by powerful statistical techniques

Question 20

Summating scores provides data that

A) are reliable
B) are simple to analyze
C) both a and b
D) neither a nor b

Question 21

In the unstructured survey,

A) data may be hard to analyze since different participants are asked different questions
B) interviewer bias is a very serious problem
C) for scientific purposes, is only of use for getting ideas for future research
D) all of the above

Question 22

Which is BAD advice in constructing a survey?

A) Pretest your questions.
B) Keep conjunctions like "and" and "but" out of your questions.
C) Keep most of your questions under 10 words.
D) Avoid overly simplistic, third-grade vocabulary.

Question 23

According to the text, what is a general rule for deciding how many personal questions you should ask in a survey?

A) Ask only for age, gender, and education level.
B) Get as much of this kind of information as the respondent is willing to give. This information is interesting and giving it to you makes the respondent more
committed to you, thus increasing the chances of the respondent participating
in future surveys.
C) Ask only those personal questions which you know are directly relevant to the purpose of the survey.
D) Asking personal questions is unprofessional.

Question 24

Which of the following is good advice?

A) Put innocuous questions first, personal questions last.
B) Put innocuous questions first, demographic questions last.
C) Don't alternate the way you phrase questions (don't make "strongly agree" the pro president answer on one question, but the anti president answer on the
next question) because this confuses respondents.
D) All of the above statements are good advice.

Question 25

Which of the following is good advice?

A) Use negations, like "no" and "not" to avoid double-barreled questions.
B) To deal with response sets, vary the way you phrase questions.
C) Use questions that are not related to your hypotheses to make the questionnaire sound more "natural" and because these questions may provide unexpectedly
useful data
D) To get more information from each question, use conjunctions like "and" and "or"

Question 26

It is often impractical to study an entire ________. Therefore, we usually study a ________ instead.

A) sample; population
B) population; statistic
C) sample; statistic
D) population; sample

Question 27

"Insuring that each member of the population has an equal probability of appearing in the sample"is the definition of ________ sampling.

A) quota
B) convenience
C) random
D) representative

Question 28

Psychologists select a random sample of research participants in order to ensure that

A) the participants are representative of the population they are interested in studying
B) there will be a large number of participants in the research study
C) the research will not be influenced by the researcher's personal values
D) the same number of participants will be assigned to each of the experimental conditions

Question 29

To use statistics to make accurate generalizations from a sample to a population, it is important to observe a _______ sample of cases.

A) quota
B) normally distributed
C) statistically significant
D) random

Question 30

When you select participants on the basis of their being readily available and willing to serve, you are using a

A) convenience sample
B) stratified sample
C) quota sample
D) random sample

Question 31

Sampling participants on the basis of their ready availability and how easily they can be studied is called _______ sampling.

A) probability
B) convenience
C) stratified
D) representative

Question 32

If you specify that your sample of 100 people must contain 50 males and 50 females, and 60 adults and 40 minors, but you do not intend to use random selection to obtain these participants, you will be using _____ sampling.

A) stratified
B) representative
C) convenience
D) quota

Question 33

If you specify that your sample of 100 people must contain 50 males and 50 females, and 60 adults and 40 minors, and you intend to use random selection to obtain these participants, you will be using _____ sampling.

A) stratified
B) representative
C) random
D) quota

Question 34

Using inferential statistics to generalize the results of the sample to the population is appropriate if you have used

A) random sampling
B) convenience sampling
C) quota sampling
D) both a and c

Question 35

Which of the following are suitable if you have nominal data?

A) phi coefficient
B) Pearson r
C) neither a nor b
D) both a and b

Question 36

Which of the following are suitable if you have nominal data?

A) means
B) percentages
C) neither a nor b
D) both a and b

Question 37

The sample mean is 6, the standard error is 1. We can be 95% confident that the population mean is between

A) 5 and 7
B) 4 and 8
C) 3 and 9
D) 4 and 10

Question 38

Surveys permit you to gather information from a large sample with less effort than most other data-gathering techniques.

Question 39

You can assume that survey respondents will usually answer questions truthfully.

Question 40

Surveys are a good method for collecting data about cause-effect relationships.

Question 41

Investigator-administered questionnaires have a higher response rate than self-administered surveys.

Question 42

Telephone surveys offer greater anonymity than personal interviews.

Question 43

Unstructured surveys are usually more useful than structured interviews because they give the researcher more flexibility.

Question 44

Nonresponse bias is a major threat to obtaining a random sample.

Question 45

Usually it doesn't matter what order survey questions are given in.

Question 46

It is a good idea to pretest survey question items.

Question 47

Random sampling permits you to make statistical inferences from your data.