Sence and Nonsense About Surveys

This article was written by Howard Schuman, the reason why I choose this article is because I believed in surveys 90%. By reading this article I understood so many things I never thought of, surveys are not always true there are so many different ways to make a survey and not all the interviewers use the correct techniques to make it right and what I mean by this is that sometimes they don’t include the whole population or they can simply manipulate it. Howard discussed that understanding a survey is critical to being an informed citizen, but popular media often report surveys without any guidance on how to interpret and evaluate the results. He also mentioned how a little mistake can cause a survey to be fault; answers to survey questions always depend on the form in which a question is asked. Nowadays people are making surveys by phone or internet, picking the phone numbers from a directory book but not everybody has a phone or an e-mail address so I ask myself how are they going to make a conclusion if they didn’t interview the whole population? I guess they will just make up the survey without having everyone’s opinion. In chapter two from the book I also learned a lot of methods of collecting data and in sociology the most common used method is survey. And is very related to the article “Sense and Nonsense about Surveys”, the book gives a clear example on page (41) where it says that researchers also need to pay attention to the way the questions in a survey are worded because even small variations on wording can influence results significantly. Surveys might have problems such as different definitions, lack of clarity, loaded language etc. many surveys are true on example is the pew research center who comes up with the polling numbers about elections. Surveys are like opinions and everybody has a different point of view.