How to Conduct Surveys : A Step-by-Step Guide

Popular for helping readers to organize a rigorous survey and evaluate the credibility of other ones by giving them practical, step-by-step advice, the Second Edition of this book now also covers: computer-assisted and interactive surveys and how they contrast with telephone and face-to-face surveys; guidelines for preparing informed consent statements for survey respondents; ways to ensure the sample you have is large enough to detect a difference between groups (if one exists); ways to ask questions about ethnicity; how to read computer output containing survey results; how to prepare a structured abstract of a survey report; new survey data analysis techniques, such as odds ratios, relative risks, and confidence intervals as well as sampling techniques, such as snowball sampling; and guidelines for preparing overheads and slides to report survey results with illustrations of how an oral presentation of survey results differs from a written one.

Arlene Fink (PhD) is Professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of the Langley Research Institute. Her main interests include evaluation and survey research and the conduct of research literature reviews as well as the evaluation of their quality. Dr. Fink has conducted scores of evaluation studies in public health, medicine, and education. She is on the faculty of UCLA’s Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and is a scientific and evaluation advisor to UCLA’s Gambling Studies and IMPACT (Improving Access, Counseling & Treatment for Californians with Prostate Cancer) programs. She consults nationally and internationally for agencies such as L’institut de Promotion del la Prévention Secondaire en Addictologie (IPPSA) in Paris, France, and Peninsula Health in Victoria, Australia. Professor Fink has taught and lectured extensively all over the world and is the author of more than 130 peer-reviewed articles and 15 textbooks.