Introduction to Survey Research

PS 544, SOC 544, JOURN 544, URB R PL 544

Spring 2014

Lecturer TA
Samantha Vortherms Vera Cai Zuo
[email protected] (Please put “544” in the subject of emails) [email protected]
Office: North Hall 411 Office: North Hall 121
OH: Monday 2:30–4:30 or by appointment

This course will provide an introduction and overview to how surveys are used in vari-
ous ways in modern day politics, business, marketing, and journalism. You will learn how
surveys are designed, conducted, and analyzed. Throughout the course, you will practice
creating, evaluating, critiquing, and analyzing surveys yourself. This will be a very skills-
based class, which will require additional work on your part, but will result in marketable
skills for a variety of careers. At the end of this course, you should be able to critically
assess polls and surveys used by the government, media, and other research institutions, in
addition to being able to design and execute surveys of your own.

This course will be of interest to any student interested in a better understanding of so-
cial surveys, from political polling to social surveys. While many examples will be drawn
from political science research, the skills developed in this course can be applied to many
different fields of research.

Topics covered include causal inference, the scientific method, the purpose of survey re-
search, survey sampling and dealing with non-response, survey design, methods of survey
data collection, issues in question wording, psychology of survey response, analysis of survey
data, ethical issues in survey research, and description of survey data in meaningful ways.

Required Readings
You are required to use ONE of the following two books.

Basic: Floyd J. Fowler, Jr. Survey Research Methods. Sage. (either 4th (2008) or 5th
(2013) edition)

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More advanced: Robert M. Groves, Floyd J. Fowler Jr., Mick P. Couper, James M. Lep-
kowski, Eleanor Singer, Roger Tourangeau. Survey Methodology. Wiley. 2009.

The Fowler book provides a basic introduction and includes all of the required informa-
tion for the course. The Groves et al. book provides a much deeper and more comprehensive
coverage of the same material. If you are interested in pursuing survey research in the future,
I recommend the Groves et al. book, given that it provides the most detail.

The Fowler book is available at the book store and both books are available at various
online retailers.

Additional readings may be emailed out throughout the course of the semester. You
should be familiar with the material in the assigned readings BEFORE class or section on
the topic.

Assignments and Grading Grading in this course will be based on three main com-
ponents – weekly exercises, a final project, and section participation. You will have 6 short
“weekly assignments,” each of which are due one week after they are assigned and will either
include some calculations, an activity related to the skills discussed in class or a short written
response. Some assignments will require some math, which will be covered in lecture. You
must complete all assignments throughout the semester.

Weekly assignments should be completed individually unless stated otherwise. They are
to be entirely your own work. Therefore there should never be a reason for two exercises
to resemble each other and no possibility that such resemblance comes from “working to-
gether.” Just don’t do it. (See the academic integrity section below for further details.)

The final project is your chance to show us everything you have learned in this class and
apply it to a topic of your choice and will be completed in small groups (2-3). In the final
project, you will be responsible for posing a research question, explaining it in detail, design-
ing a sample and questionnaire to test your question, explaining, critiquing, and defending
the measures you employ for testing your question, analyzing the data, explaining the results,
and suggesting conclusions and implications which can be drawn from the results you obtain.
The resulting report, along with appropriate tables and graphs, is due at the scheduled time
of the final for this class: Thursday, May 15th at 7pm. This is an intensive project that
will be completed in stages throughout the semester. Notably, there will be the following
due dates:

February 12, 2014 Research question (.5-1 page)

February 26, 2014 Population and sampling strategy (1-2 pages)

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 March 12, 2014 Mode and Questionnaire (1.5-2 pages+questionnaire)

April 16, 2014 Initial Data Results (2-5 pages)

Last Week of Class Group Presentation

May 16, 2014, 7pm Final Project Due (10-15 pages)

Part of your grade for the final project (10% of the Final Project grade) will depend on a
peer review, where members of your group will evaluate your participation and contribution
to the group project. If you do not participate in the group project, you will receive
an F for the project portion of your grade. More information on the project including
the requirements for each stage and grading expectations will be provided in the first weeks
of the semester.

Finally, you are expected to attend both lecture and section. Section will be conducted
as a lab and many of the skills you are tested over in the weekly assignments will be learned
and/or practiced in your section time. It is thus very important for your grade in this class
and the overall knowledge you hope to gain from this course that you attend section every
week.

Grades will be assigned as follows:

Weekly assignments 45 points

Final project total 40 points
Research Question 5%
Population and Sample 10%
Mode and Quesionnaire 10%
Initial Results 20%
Final Product 35%
Presentation 10%
Peer Review 10%
Section participation 15 points

Late assignment policy: Work is due at the times noted in the schedule below and/or
within each assignment. Extensions will be provided only in the case of illness or other
serious personal circumstances, and only if I am contacted in advance. Late assignments
will be penalized one full grade for each day past the deadline, and not accepted after one
week. In all cases, the decision to award extensions or to provide a makeup assignment is at
my discretion.

I have tried to schedule exams/papers to avoid conflicts with religious holidays. If, despite
my efforts, it should happen that a due date for an assignment conflicts with your observance

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of a religious holiday, please let me know during the first two weeks of the semester so we
can work on an accommodation.

Academic integrity
You are expected to treat both yourself and your classmates with respect throughout this
course. Please do not disrupt the class (do not read the paper, keep your cellphone on –
including texting, listen to your MP3 player, clean out your backpack, update your Facebook
page, etc.), and respect the views of others at all times. If you fail to adhere to these policies
you may be asked to leave the classroom.

This is your only warning regarding academic misconduct. I take the issue of plagiarism
very seriously and will use available technology to ensure that everyone is generating origi-
nal work throughout the semester. I will pursue academic misconduct charges against anyone
who violates the University policy.

The University’s policy and description of academic misconduct is fully described at this
webpage: http://students.wisc.edu/saja/misconduct/UWS14.html

Highlights of this policy are below –

“UW-Madison students have the right to expect that they and other students will be graded
fairly, and they have the rights of due process should they be accused of misconduct. They
also have an obligation to conduct their academic work according to university standards.
Therefore, it is important that they:

• become familiar with the rules of academic misconduct;

• ask their instructors if they are unsure whether something is acceptable (for exam-
ple, how to use sources in a paper or whether to work with another student on an
assignment);

• let instructors know if they think they see incidents of misconduct; and

• be aware that helping someone else cheat is a violation of the rules.

For complete discussion of the rules regarding academic integrity, see Student Assistance
and Judicial Affairs (SAJA), or contact the on-call dean in SAJA, 608-263-5700, Room 75
Bascom Hall.”

If you have any questions about the policy, please ask.

Inclusion
People with disabilities will be fully included in this course. Please inform the professor
in the first two weeks of class if you need any special accommodations in the curriculum,

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instruction, or assessments of this course to enable you to participate fully. Confidentiality
of the shared information will be strictly maintained. Certain accommodations may require
the assistance of the McBurney Disability Office on campus. The McBurney Disability Re-
source Center can be reached at (608) 263-2741 or via email at [email protected].

Lecture Topics
Dates are subject to change. All assignments will be distributed at least one week in advance.

Week 1

January 22: Introduction

Week 2

January 27: What is a survey?

Reading: Fowler Chapter 1
January 29: Sample inference and error
Reading: Fowler Chapter 3

Week 3

February 3: Sample design

Reading: Fowler Chapter 3
February 5: Weighting data
Weekly assignment due: Samples and errors

Week 4

February 10: Non-response

February 12: Guest Lecture: Acquiring Secondary Data
Final project due: Research question (.5-1 page)

Week 5

February 17: Understanding your data

February 19: Methods of data collection
Reading: Fowler Chapter 5
Weekly assignment due: Non-response

Week 6

February 24: Question wording

Reading: Fowler Chapter 6

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 February 26: Question responses
Reading: Fowler Chapter 6
Final project due: Population and sampling strategy (1-2 pages)

Week 7

March 3: Question order and priming

Reading: Fowler Chapter 7
March 5: Other issues in survey response
Reading: Fowler Chapter 8
Weekly Assignment due: Questionnaire critique

Week 8

March 10: Guest Lecture: UW Survey Center

March 12: Ethics and IRB
Reading: Fowler Chapter 11
Final project due: Mode and Questionnaire (1.5-2 pages +Questionnaire)

SPRING BREAK

Week 9

March 24: Recording Data

Reading: Fowler Chapter 9
March 26: Scales and Indicies
Weekly assignment due: IRB training

Week 10

March 31: Surveys in non-democratic settings

April 2: Basic analysis of polls
Reading: Fowler Chapter 10

Week 11

April 7: Using polls in politics

April 9: Implications of polls
Weekly assignment due: Descriptive statistics of survey data

Week 12

April 14: Surveys and polls in public policy

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 April 16: Writing about polls, displaying survey data
Reading: Fowler Chapter 12
Final project due: Initial data results (2-5 pages)

Week 13

April 21: New formats and innovations

April 23: Sentiment analysis
Weekly assignment due: Graphical survey data

Week 14

April 28: Final Project Presentations

April 30: Final Project Presentations

Week 15

May 5: Final Project Presentations

May 7: Conclusions

Final Project due May 15th 7pm