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CHAPTER 5: Survey Research 181met to decide whether to include the surveyfindings such as this one in its final report to thedean of students.A Was the initial sample of 400 students likely tobe representative of the population of 2,000 fulltimestudents? Why or why not?B Identify a potential survey research problem thatcould be present in this study that would leadthe task force to be concerned that the finalsample was not representative of the populationof 2,000 students.C Using only the evidence that the responserate for the survey was 40%, the task forceconcluded that the final sample was notrepresentative of the population of students.They further decided that the ratings of thejudicial system as unfair by more than a thirdof the students was an incorrect overestimate.Do you agree that the finding represents anincorrect estimate? Why or why not?D While the task force was meeting to discusstheir final report, one member of the task forceex pressed the opinion that students’ responseswere unlikely to have been truthful and so theresults of the survey were useless and shouldnot be reported at all. The director of the taskforce calls on you to respond to this statement.What would you say?4 As an intern with the alumni relations office at asmall college, one of your assignments is to helpdevelop a survey-research project. The college isinterested in finding out about the alumni’s attitudestoward their academic and extracurricular experienceswhile enrolled in college. The director alsowants to include questions to assess the alumni’sopinions about the different activities the collegesponsors for them (e.g., reunions) and how theyprefer to be kept informed about issues andactivities on campus (e.g., newsletters, e-mails,postings on the college website). One of the majorgoals of the survey-research project is to determinehow the attitudes of alumni change 1, 5, or 10 yearsafter graduation.A The first step is to select the survey-researchdesign for the project. Describe the two designsthat can be used to measure changes inattitudes over time. Outline how each of thesedesigns would be implemented for this project,and identify the advantages and possiblelimitations of each design.B The second step is to select the surveyresearchmethod for the project. Members ofthe planning committee proposed three differentapproaches: (1) select a random sample ofalumni from the alumni relations office list anduse a phone survey to administer the questionnaire;(2) send an e-mail to a random sampleof alumni that includes a link to an Internet sitewhere alumni can complete the questionnaire;(3) post an announcement about the surveyand a link to the questionnaire on the college’swebsite with the request that all alumni visitingthe website complete the questionnaire.Describe to the committee the advantagesand limitations of each approach, and providea recommendation and rationale for whichapproach you think would be best.C The third step is to prepare the questionnaire.Describe the different formats that can be usedto write the questionnaire items and preparean example of a free-response (open-ended)and closed (multiple-choice) question. Usethese examples to describe the advantages anddisadvantages of each type of question.Answer to Stretching Exercise I1 D 2 B 3 A 4 CAnswer to Stretching Exercise II1 The first student researcher is proposing a stratified random sample in which 100 “Greek” and100 “independent” students are sampled. In this plan the equal-sized strata would have representativesamples for each stratum. A potentially serious flaw of this plan is that the overallsample would not represent the proportions of Greeks and independents in the population(25% and 75%, respectively). This would result in a biased sample because Greeks would besystematically overrepresented in the survey. The second student researcher is proposing asimple random sample of 100 students from the campus population. While this is likely to leadto a more representative sample, it will probably result in too few respondents in the “Greek”category (we’d expect about 25 Greeks) to adequately represent their viewpoint.