Finding Research

1. Who does survey research and how do they do it? These questions can be answered through careful inspection of organizations listed at www.ukans.edu/cwis/units/coms2/po/index.html. Spend some time reading about some of the different survey research organizations, and write a brief summary of the types of research they conduct, the projects in which they are involved, and the resources that they offer on their website. What are the distinctive features of different survey research organizations?

2. Go to the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) site at www.rti.org and click on "Tools and Methods," "Surveys," and then "Survey Design & Development." Find the links from the words "cognitive pretesting" and "computer-assisted interviewing." Read about RTI's methods for computer-assisted interviewing and their cognitive laboratory methods for refining questions. What does this add to our treatment of these topics in this chapter?

Critiquing Research

1. Go to the Centre for Applied Social Surveys Question Bank at http://qb.soc.surrey.ac.uk/docs/home.htm. Click on the link for one of the listed surveys. Review 10 questions used in the survey and critique them in terms of the principles for question writing that you have learned. Do you find any question features that might be attributed to the use of British English?