Assignment : Conducting Surveys, Interviews, and Focus Groups

The purpose of this assignment is to help you develop effective questioning skills for surveys and interviews with individuals and groups.

A researcher must select the type of survey or interview to conduct and develop questions to address his or her topic.

It is important to understand the advantages and disadvantages of using surveys and interviews to collect data and the type of data (quantitative or qualitative) the results will produce.

Tasks:

Your discussion should include the following components:

• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of conducting interviews.

• Describe the advantages and disadvantages of conducting surveys.

• Determine which type of survey or interview (or both) you would use to collect data for your applied research project (explain your answer).

• If you will use interviews to collect data for your applied research study, describe the type of interview (structured, semi-structured, unstructured, nondirective, focused, telephone, or Internet based) or focus group styles you would want to use and prepare 10 sample questions.

• If you will use a survey to collect data for your applied research study, describe the type of survey that would be most appropriate for your topic (Likert scale, rating scales, or open-ended questions) and identify whether it would produce quantitative or qualitative data. Prepare 10 sample questions.

• Discuss the data collection and analysis technique you would use (manual or electronic) and provide the rationale.

• Explain how you would analyze the data collected if you actually conducted the survey or interviews.

Support your rationale and analysis by using at least two resources from professional literature in your response. Professional literature may include the Argosy University online library resources; relevant textbooks; peer-reviewed journal articles; and websites created by professional organizations, agencies, or institutions (websites ending in .edu or .gov).