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Under a Creative Commons license Open access AbstractAdolescence is a period of rapid change, with cognitive, mental wellbeing, environmental biological factors interacting to shape lifelong outcomes. Large, longitudinal phenotypically rich data sets available for reuse (secondary data) have revolutionized the way we study adolescence, allowing the field to examine these unfolding processes across hundreds or even thousands of individuals. Here, we outline the opportunities and challenges associated with such secondary data sets, provide an overview of particularly valuable resources available to the field, and recommend best practices to improve the rigor and transparency of analyses conducted on large, secondary data sets. Cited by (0)© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Chapter 9: Survey Research
What Is Survey Research?is a quantitative and qualitative method with two important characteristics. First, the variables of interest are measured using self-reports. In essence, survey researchers ask their participants (who are often called in survey research) to report directly on their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Second, considerable attention is paid to the issue of sampling. In particular, survey researchers have a strong preference for large random samples because they provide the most accurate estimates of what is true in the population. In fact, survey research may be the only approach in psychology in which random sampling is routinely used. Beyond these two characteristics, almost anything goes in survey research. Surveys can be long or short. They can be conducted in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the Internet. They can be about voting intentions, consumer preferences, social attitudes, health, or anything else that it is possible to ask people about and receive meaningful answers. Although survey data are often analyzed using statistics, there are many questions that lend themselves to more qualitative analysis. Most survey research is nonexperimental. It is used to describe single variables (e.g., the percentage of voters who prefer one presidential candidate or another, the prevalence of schizophrenia in the general population) and also to assess statistical relationships between variables (e.g., the relationship between income and health). But surveys can also be experimental. The study by Lerner and her colleagues is a good example. Their use of self-report measures and a large national sample identifies their work as survey research. But their manipulation of an independent variable (anger vs. fear) to assess its effect on a dependent variable (risk judgments) also identifies their work as experimental. History and Uses of Survey ResearchSurvey research may have its roots in English and American “social surveys” conducted around the turn of the 20th century by researchers and reformers who wanted to document the extent of social problems such as poverty (Converse, 1987)[1].By the 1930s, the US government was conducting surveys to document economic and social conditions in the country. The need to draw conclusions about the entire population helped spur advances in sampling procedures. At about the same time, several researchers who had already made a name for themselves in market research, studying consumer preferences for American businesses, turned their attention to election polling. A watershed event was the presidential election of 1936 between Alf Landon and Franklin Roosevelt. A magazine called Literary Digest conducted a survey by sending ballots (which were also subscription requests) to millions of Americans. Based on this “straw poll,” the editors predicted that Landon would win in a landslide. At the same time, the new pollsters were using scientific methods with much smaller samples to predict just the opposite—that Roosevelt would win in a landslide. In fact, one of them, George Gallup, publicly criticized the methods ofLiterary Digest before the election and all but guaranteed that his prediction would be correct. And of course it was. (We will consider the reasons that Gallup was right later in this chapter.) Interest in surveying around election times has led to several long-term projects, notably the Canadian Election Studies which has measured opinions of Canadian voters around federal elections since 1965. Anyone can access the data and read about the results of the experiments in these studies. From market research and election polling, survey research made its way into several academic fields, including political science, sociology, and public health—where it continues to be one of the primary approaches to collecting new data. Beginning in the 1930s, psychologists made important advances in questionnaire design, including techniques that are still used today, such as the Likert scale. (See “What Is a Likert Scale?” in Section 9.2 “Constructing Survey Questionnaires”.) Survey research has a strong historical association with the social psychological study of attitudes, stereotypes, and prejudice. Early attitude researchers were also among the first psychologists to seek larger and more diverse samples than the convenience samples of university students that were routinely used in psychology (and still are). Survey research continues to be important in psychology today. For example, survey data have been instrumental in estimating the prevalence of various mental disorders and identifying statistical relationships among those disorders and with various other factors. The National Comorbidity Survey is a large-scale mental health survey conducted in the United States. In just one part of this survey, nearly 10,000 adults were given a structured mental health interview in their homes in 2002 and 2003. Table 9.1 presents results on the lifetime prevalence of some anxiety, mood, and substance use disorders. (Lifetime prevalence is the percentage of the population that develops the problem sometime in their lifetime.) Obviously, this kind of information can be of great use both to basic researchers seeking to understand the causes and correlates of mental disorders as well as to clinicians and policymakers who need to understand exactly how common these disorders are. Table 9.1 Some Lifetime Prevalence[2] Results From the National Comorbidity Study
And as the opening example makes clear, survey research can even be used to conduct experiments to test specific hypotheses about causal relationships between variables. Such studies, when conducted on large and diverse samples, can be a useful supplement to laboratory studies conducted on university students. Although this approach is not a typical use of survey research, it certainly illustrates the flexibility of this method.
Discussion: Think of a question that each of the following professionals might try to answer using survey research.
What kind of research is traditionally considered to be the gold standard in psychology research?The laboratory experiment is traditionally considered the “gold standard” in psychology research. This is because only laboratory experiments can clearly separate cause from effect and therefore establish causality.
What is the name for the interdisciplinary field that combines biology and social psychology?Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior, and to using biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social processes and behavior.
What is the highest level of analysis in social psychology?The four levels of analysis in social psychology (intraindividual, interindividual, positional, and ideological) proposed at that time could be expanded nowadays with two more levels for a more accurate articulation of explanations: the social brain and the intersocietal studies.
Which common saying is the foundation of the concept reciprocity?The "eye for an eye" principles in which the laws were written mirror the idea of direct reciprocity. For example, if a person caused the death of another person, the killer would be put to death: Law #196: "If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.
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Historical or publicly-available data is often used for what type of research?
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