In statistics, quality assurance, and survey methodology, sampling is the selection of a subset or a statistical sample of individuals from within a statistical population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. The subset is meant to reflect the whole population and statisticians attempt to collect samples that are representative of the population. Sampling has lower costs and faster data collection compared to recording data from the entire population, and thus, it can provide insights in cases where it is infeasible to measure an entire population.
Questionnaire construction refers to the design of a questionnaire to gather statistically useful information about a given topic. When properly constructed and responsibly administered, questionnaires can provide valuable data about any given subject.
Survey methodology is "the study of survey methods". As a field of applied statistics concentrating on human-research surveys, survey methodology studies the sampling of individual units from a population and associated techniques of survey data collection, such as questionnaire construction and methods for improving the number and accuracy of responses to surveys. Survey methodology targets instruments or procedures that ask one or more questions that may or may not be answered.
Social research is research conducted by social scientists following a systematic plan. Social research methodologies can be classified as quantitative and qualitative.
The American Community Survey (ACS) is an annual demographics survey program conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. It regularly gathers information previously contained only in the long form of the decennial census, including ancestry, US citizenship status, educational attainment, income, language proficiency, migration, disability, employment, and housing characteristics. These data are used by many public-sector, private-sector, and not-for-profit stakeholders to allocate funding, track shifting demographics, plan for emergencies, and learn about local communities.
NORC at the University of Chicago, previously the National Opinion Research Center, is an independent social research organization in the United States. Established in 1941, its corporate headquarters is located in downtown Chicago, with offices in several other locations throughout the United States. Organized as an independent corporation, more than half its board comes from faculty and administration of the University of Chicago. It also jointly staffs some of the university's academic research centers.
The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) is a collaboration between different nations conducting surveys covering topics which are useful for social science research. The ISSP researchers develop questions which are meaningful and relevant to all countries which can be expressed in an equal manner in different languages. The results of the surveys provide a cross-national and cross-cultural perspective to individual national studies. By 2021, 58 countries have already taken part in the ISSP.
The German General Social Survey (ALLBUS/GGSS - Die Allgemeine Bevölkerungsumfrage der Sozialwissenschaften) is a national data generation program in Germany, which is similar to the American General Social Survey (GSS). Its mission is to collect and disseminate high quality statistical surveys on attitudes, behavior, and social structure in Germany.
The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is a triennial statistical survey of the balance sheet, pension, income and other demographic characteristics of families in the United States; the survey also gathers information on the use of financial institutions.
In research of human subjects, a survey is a list of questions aimed for extracting specific data from a particular group of people. Surveys may be conducted by phone, mail, via the internet, and also in person in public spaces. Surveys are used to gather or gain knowledge in fields such as social research and demography.
James A. Davis (1929–2016) was a distinguished American sociologist who is best known as a pioneer in the application of quantitative statistical methods to social science research and teaching. Most recently, he was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Official statistics are statistics published by government agencies or other public bodies such as international organizations as a public good. They provide quantitative or qualitative information on all major areas of citizens' lives, such as economic and social development, living conditions, health, education, and the environment.
The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) is a longitudinal panel survey of American families, conducted by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.
The Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS) is a national research infrastructure, created in 2008. FORS is financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the University of Lausanne. Its purpose is to provide services to the social science research community, to conduct research, and to publish and disseminate research findings.
SAVE is a representative data collection about private households’ saving behaviour in Germany. The survey was conducted in 2001 for the first time.
The Making Connections Survey is a neighborhood-based, longitudinal and cross-sectional survey funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It serves as an evaluation of a larger initiative supported by the foundation and was designed to collect data measuring how neighborhood change affects the well-being of children. The Making Connections Survey was conducted by National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago between 2002 and 2011 with residents in ten low-income communities across the United States. The final survey dataset includes responses from roughly 28,000 interviews at three points in time.
The Media Technology Monitor (MTM) is research product designed to monitor Canadians' use and adoption of new and existing technologies. The first MTM 18+ questionnaire, which focuses on Canadian adults, was distributed in 2005 and now consists of two annual telephone and web surveys conducted once during spring and fall each year. MTM 18+ surveys Canadians from all Provinces and Territories of Canada.
The GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences is the largest German infrastructure institute for the social sciences. It is headquartered in Mannheim, with a location in Cologne. With basic research-based services and consulting covering all levels of the scientific process, GESIS supports researchers in the social sciences. As of 2017, the president of GESIS is Christof Wolf.
The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative research project among national election studies around the world. Participating countries and polities include a common module of survey questions in their national post-election studies. The resulting data are collated together along with voting, demographic, district and macro variables into one dataset allowing comparative analysis of voting behavior from a multilevel perspective.
Wordsum is a 10-item vocabulary test that has been included as an item on the General Social Survey (GSS) in most survey years since 1974. Each of the test's items ranges in difficulty from very easy to very difficult. It is widely used in research in the social and behavioral sciences. It is taken by about 1,000 people in each year in which it is included as part of the GSS. Its administration involves showing respondents a card containing 10 words, and then asking them to find the synonym for each of them out of a set of five choices. Although most researchers have implicitly assumed that each item on the test deserves equal weight, its validity can be improved by considering the variance for each word separately.
