Expertise
Standardised interview
Marie von Meyer-Höfer and Peter Elsasser | 29.06.2022
Surveys are considered the best way of social research. They can be conducted online, by letter, on the phone or in direct personal contact.
The aim of representative surveys is to make generalised statements about a population - e.g. about all consumers of a certain product. However, it would be too costly to always survey all consumers on every research topic. Instead, a sample is selected that represents the population, e.g. by taking part in an online survey on a specific topic.
When selecting the survey participants, care is taken to ensure that they correspond to the distribution of certain characteristics in the population (representativeness). For example, since 49 percent of the German population is male, 49 percent of the survey participants should also be male. Therefore, in addition to information related to the research question, personal data such as age, gender and income of the participants are also requested.
Advantage of online surveys: Participants determine time and place
Usually, the Thünen Institute commissions market research agencies to select people for surveys. The agencies have different options for this. For online surveys, for example, they use large, ISO-certified online panels in which people have registered who are available for interviews. The participants recruited in this way then receive a link from the Thünen Institute through which they can access the respective survey. On their own terminal device, the invited consumers then take part in the survey, which usually takes about 10 to 20 minutes. However, survey participants can also be selected via other channels, e.g. existing networks or on the basis of their expertise (expert survey).
A great advantage of standardised online surveys is that they take place anonymously and the respondents can determine the time and place of their participation themselves. The data collected from the respondents is of course treated confidentially, anonymised and only evaluated for scientific purposes. When publishing the results, care is taken to ensure that no conclusions can be drawn about individual persons.
Prerequisite for success: Precise answer options
In general, the questions are developed by the researchers against the background of the respective research problem and tested to see whether they are generally comprehensible, enable sufficiently precise answers and cover the issue under investigation accurately enough. In the survey, the participants can then either choose from several predefined answer options per question (closed questions) or they can formulate their answers freely (open questions).
The data generated with the help of surveys can be analysed with various statistical evaluation methods in the case of closed questions. Often, "multivariate methods" such as cluster analyses or regression analyses are used, with which compressed evaluations of a large amount of data are possible. If the answers to the questions were freely formulated by the participants (open questions), text analyses are used, for example.
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