My research topic is “The Impact of Bilingual Education on Young Children’s Cognitive Development.”
Design a survey of between twenty and twenty-five questions based on the guidelines we learned in class. You may choose the target population of your choice and the survey may or may not be related to your larger end-of-semester final research paper. Make sure to include demographic questions such as age, sex, household income, and racial and ethnic category. Your survey should include questions that would capture some potential interesting outcome variable or variables of interest as well as some hypothesized predictor variables. (Thus, you will have to put some thought into what you are going to ask in addition to how you are going to ask it). You will need to consider where in the survey you will place specific questions and to avoid the collection of pitfalls that many surveys may fall into.
Be aware of what type of data will be produced by what type of question. Your questions should be varied in the types of data that they will produce. The questions should yield the closed-ended and open-ended (qualitative) types of data. Be sure to make sure that your questions are specific (not double-barreled), that the possibilities provided are generally exhaustive and avoid leading the respondent and ordered effects since they could introduce a bias into your survey. See pages 118-132 of Kalof et al. (2008) to serve as a guide for what to avoid. The topic of the survey should have some sociological import. Surveys that do not investigate sociological questions and/or surveys downloaded from the internet are strictly not allowed and will be given a 0.
