Describe four different ways that surveys can be administered? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

In-person interview—a survey in which an interviewer questions respondents face-to-face and records their answers; in-person interview advantages—response rates are higher than with any other survey design; questionnaires can be complex, with both open-ended and closed-ended questions and frequent branching patterns, the order in which questions are read and answered can be controlled by the interviewer, the physical and social circumstances of the interview can be monitored, and respondents' interpretations of questions can be probed and clarified; in-person interview disadvantages—special hazards due to the presence of an interviewer, more expensive, and trained staff needed to do the interviews; self-administered (mailed). survey—a survey involving a mailed questionnaire to be completed by the respondent; self-administered survey advantages—cheaper and can reach more people within the population; self-administered survey disadvantages—low response rate and the hazard of incomplete response (skipping questions); telephone survey—a survey in which interviewers question respondents over the phone and then record their answers; telephone survey advantages—cheaper and can reach more people than in-depth interviews; telephone survey disadvantages—may not be reaching the proper sampling units and not getting enough complete responses to make the results generalizable; web survey—a survey that is accessed and responded to on the Internet; web survey advantages—many specific populations have very high rates of Internet use, technological advances make web-based survey design relatively easy, and it is possible to conduct large, international surveys; disadvantages—cannot reach many populations since about 30 percent of American households are still not connected to the internet, people may have more than one e-mail account and thus take the same survey multiple times, and there is no available method for drawing random samples of e-mail addresses for people from any general population; group-administered survey—a survey that is completed by individual respondents who are assembled in a group; group-administered survey advantages—can be used to access populations such as students, employees, members of the armed forces, and some institutionalized populations; group-administered survey disadvantages—this method is seldom feasible, most populations cannot be sampled in such a setting, whoever is responsible for administering the survey to the group must be careful to minimize comments that might bias answers or that could vary between different groups in the same survey, and there is a possibility that respondents will feel coerced to participate and will be less likely to answer questions honestly.