Course:ENVR400/Social
How to do a survey (references) updated on Nov. 16th, 2010
Steps:
1. Establish the goals of the project
In our case, the goal for taking surveys is to find the current attitudes of urban agriculture of residents in Vancouver city, as well as their willingness of community gardens with provided options.
2. Determine your sample
There are two main components in determining whom you will interview. The first is deciding what kind of people to interview (target population), the other one is how many people you need to interview.
(a) Our target population is residents in Vancouver city, to be more specific, is the people who have abilities to plant crops in the city.
(b) The size of our population needs more discussion. Survey System website has the sample size calculator, which can provide us with the suggested sample size by providing the given values of confidence interval, confidence level and population. Moreover, we need to consider the possible bias samples. To avoid those, we need to rethink our methodology and questions. Also, quotas are important in our project. such as gender, income, ages.
Quota is a sample size for a sub-group. It is sometimes useful to establish quotas to ensure that your sample accurately reflects relevant sub-groups in your target population. For example, men and women have somewhat different opinions in many areas. If you want your survey to accurately reflect the general population's opinions, you will want to ensure that the percentage of men and women in your sample reflect their percentages of the general population.
If you are interviewing users of a particular type of product, you probably want to ensure that users of the different current brands are represented in proportions that approximate the current market share. Alternatively, you may want to ensure that you have enough users of each brand to be able to analyze the users of each brand as a separate group. If you are doing telephone or Web page interviewing, The Survey System's optional Sample Management or Internet Module can help you enforce quotas. They let you create automatically enforced quotas and/or monitor your sample during interviewing sessions.
3. Choose interviewing methodology
Interviewing Methods include personal interview, online surveys, email surveys, mail surveys and telephone surveys. There are also some other methods in conducting surveys which are listed in Survey System.
4. Create your questionnaire
1. The first rule is to design the questionnaire to fit the medium. Different methods should use the same questionnaire.
2. KISS - keep it short and simple. If necessary, place your questions into three groups: must know, useful to know and nice to know. Discard the last group, unless the previous two groups are very short.
3. Start with an introduction or welcome message.
4. Allow a “Don't Know” or “Not Applicable” response to all questions, except to those in which you are certain that all respondents will have a clear answer.
5. Include “Other” or “None” whenever either of these is a logically possible answer. When the answer choices are a list of possible opinions, preferences, or behaviors, you should usually allow these answers.
Other tips of creating questions are all in the following web pages, we can take them as references when we are designing our own questions
Designing surveys and questionnaires
5. Pre-test the questionnaire, if practical
The last step in questionnaire design is to test a questionnaire with a small number of interviews before conducting your main interviews. Ideally, you should test the survey on the same kinds of people you will include in the main study. If that is not possible, at least have a few people, other than the question writer, try the questionnaire. This kind of test run can reveal unanticipated problems with question wording, instructions to skip questions, etc. It can help you see if the interviewees understand your questions and give useful answers.
If you change any questions after a pre-test, you should not combine the results from the pre-test with the results of post-test interviews. The Survey System will invariably provide you with mathematically correct answers to your questions, but choosing sensible questions and administering surveys with sensitivity and common sense will improve the quality of your results dramatically.
6. Conduct interviews and enter data
7. Analyze the data
Survey working draft and notes
where do they live (assumptions made based on where we sample)
do they have a backyard
if yes, have they planted crops and what type?
if yes, what have they planted?
would they be willing for other people to come into their backyards and plant?
if they don't, would they like like more community gardens?
safeway, save on, granville island, capers, IGA, local farmers markets, tnt,
rs what farmers markets around
would you like to eat more locally grown food and why?
Urban Agricultural Organizations
City Farm Boy
This organization makes raised beds, trellises, and replaces lawns with vegetable beds. They also offer consultations that assess soil type, sunlight, layout, drainage, and the agricultural methods.
Social Team Individual Pages (Archived)