Assignment: Survey Design

Assignment: Survey Design

Assignment: Needs Assessment Surveys

Human and social services professionals are both consumers and producers of research. While having a thorough understanding of the meaning of research for professional practice is essential, it is also important for you to have a basic understanding of how to conduct research. Surveys can be one form of research used for all areas of your practice, but they are especially useful in needs assessment. You can use surveys to determine unmet client needs or the degree to which clients are satisfied with your current services. They may also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular program offered by a school, hospital, organization, or agency.

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For this Application, you develop a survey instrument and describe your procedures for analyzing the data. These experiences will help you to develop a foundational knowledge of survey methodology.   To Prepare  Imagine that you are creating a needs assessment for the professional issue or interest you identified in this week’s Discussion. Develop an operational definition for the construct you will need to measure (e.g., “job satisfaction”). Then, construct a 10-item survey to measure this construct. Your survey questions should be measurable and based on one of the designs in the Learning Resources (i.e., Likert scale, indexes, etc.).

The Assignment (2 pages):  Submit your 10-item survey and a brief explanation of the survey design used to construct it. Be sure to include the operationalized definition of the construct you wish to measure. Briefly explain your rationale for including the items and describe how you would collect and analyze data from the survey. Finally, explain at least one challenge in constructing a survey of this nature. Be specific and provide examples.

Babbie, E. (2016). The basics of social research (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage.   •Chapter 5, “Conceptualization, Operationalization, and Measurement” (pp. 125–158) https://cengagebrain.vitalsource.com/books/9781305856318/pageid/154

•Chapter 6, “Indexes, Scales, and Typologies” (pp. 159–189)https://cengagebrain.vitalsource.com/books/9781305856318/pageid/188

•Chapter 7, “The Logic of Sampling” (pp. 190–231) https://cengagebrain.vitalsource.com/books/9781305856318/pageid/219

•Chapter 9, “Survey Research” (pp. 254–294)https://cengagebrain.vitalsource.com/books/9781305856318/pageid/283

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

• The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.