Today we are often inundated with requests for our opinions. How many times have you been asked to take a survey by a brand in exchange for a potential reward? In a world where everyone wants our data for everything, it can feel obnoxious at times. The digital age makes it almost too easy to ask everyone what they think of everything nearly all the time. It can be very overwhelming. Even my college sends out surveys for its students to take all the time. For someone to want to take your survey, it must seem interesting while not appearing to be too difficult to respond to. People need to want to take your survey, as so many are shoved in their faces on the regular. This is unfortunate, especially considering how useful a survey is as a method of research.

With a healthy awareness for the many ways that bias can affect the results of a survey, one can retrieve some viable data. The most important aspect of a survey is how well the questions and formatting work to help prevent as much bias as possible from affecting the answers from each respondent. Surveys are especially effective when it comes to social science as well, considering how trying to run experiments to test out complex real world problems can be difficult in comparison to other more traditional sciences which may use other research methods. Within more traditional science, there are many unchanging patterns and rules which govern how the world works. In social science, it is not that simple as people are highly variable. What may be true in one scenario may not be true in the next. This is why we often need the voices of the people themselves when it comes to research in a social science.

As for the world views of the other survey respondents, I am not entirely sure if they will share a similar world view as me. I like to think that most people are progressive in this day and age, but most people are not well-informed on modern social issues, and by no fault of their own. That sort of knowledge and awareness must be sought out, as it might only be skimmed in public education. There is also the factor of ones own gender, race, and social class. These aspects can have a real impact upon ones world view, which can definitely have an impact upon a response to a survey. Gender, race, and social class all together have a very real impact on the way someone lives their day to day lives in a society that is divided along those lines. These factors create a substantial enough change in the way someone grows up and lives their life, that we have to be conscious of them when considering survey respondents. A man has a very different experience than a woman, a white person has a very different experience than a black person, and a poor person has a very different experience than a rich person. These all influence perspectives.

“Questionnaire Design.” Pew Research Center Methods. Pew Research Center. Accessed February 5, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/u-s-survey-research/questionnaire-design/.