What are the five basic survey designs? Give an example of each.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The five basic survey designs are the mailed (self-administered) survey, group-administered survey, phone survey, in-person survey, and electronic or Web survey. Exhibit 7.6 summarizes the typical features of the five designs. Each survey design varies in its arrangement and application.
A mailed (self-administered) survey is conducted by mailing a questionnaire to respondents, who then administer the survey themselves. The principal drawback in using this method of survey administration is the difficulty maximizing the response rate—we have to rely on people to voluntarily return the surveys! The final response rate is unlikely to be much above 80% and almost surely will be below 70% unless procedures to maximize the response rate are precisely followed. A response rate below 60% is a disaster, and even a 70% response rate is not much more than minimally acceptable. It is hard to justify the representativeness of the sample if more than a third of those surveyed fail to respond.
A group-administered survey is completed by individual respondents assembled in a group. The response rate is not usually a concern in surveys that are distributed and collected in a group setting because most group members will participate. The difficulty with this method is that assembling a group is seldom feasible because it requires a captive audience. With the exception of students, employees, members of the armed forces, and some institutionalized populations, most populations cannot be sampled in such a setting.
In a phone survey, interviewers question respondents over the phone and then record their answers. Phone interviewing has become a very popular method of conducting surveys in the United States because almost all families have phones. But two matters may undermine the validity of a phone survey: not reaching the proper sampling units and not getting enough complete responses to make the results generalizable.
What is unique to the in-person interview, compared to the other survey designs, is the face-to-face social interaction between interviewer and respondent. If financial resources are available for hiring interviewers to go out and personally conduct the surveys with respondents, in-person interviewing is often the best survey design.
Electronic surveys have become increasingly useful for two reasons: growth in the fraction of the population using the Internet and technological advances (often using the Web or e-mail) that make electronic survey design, often done using the Web or email, relatively easy.