

In fact, one of them, George Gallup, publicly criticized the methods of Literary Digest before the election and all but guaranteed that his prediction would be correct. At the same time, the new pollsters were using scientific methods with much smaller samples to predict just the opposite-that Roosevelt would win in a landslide. Based on this “straw poll,” the editors predicted that Landon would win in a landslide. A magazine called Literary Digest conducted a survey by sending ballots (which were also subscription requests) to millions of Americans. A watershed event was the presidential election of 1936 between Alf Landon and Franklin Roosevelt. At about the same time, several researchers who had already made a name for themselves in market research, studying consumer preferences for American businesses, turned their attention to election polling. The need to draw conclusions about the entire population helped spur advances in sampling procedures. By the 1930s, the US government was conducting surveys to document economic and social conditions in the country. Survey research may have its roots in English and American “social surveys” conducted around the turn of the 20th century by researchers and reformers who wanted to document the extent of social problems such as poverty (Converse, 1987). fear) to assess its effect on a dependent variable (risk judgments) also identifies their work as experimental. But their manipulation of an independent variable (anger vs.

Their use of self-report measures and a large national sample identifies their work as survey research. The study by Lerner and her colleagues is a good example. It is used to describe single variables (e.g., the percentage of voters who prefer one presidential candidate or another, the prevalence of schizophrenia in the general population) and also to assess statistical relationships between variables (e.g., the relationship between income and health). Although survey data are often analyzed using statistics, there are many questions that lend themselves to more qualitative analysis. They can be about voting intentions, consumer preferences, social attitudes, health, or anything else that it is possible to ask people about and receive meaningful answers.


They can be conducted in person, by telephone, through the mail, or over the Internet. Beyond these two characteristics, almost anything goes in survey research. In fact, survey research may be the only approach in psychology in which random sampling is routinely used. In particular, survey researchers have a strong preference for large random samples because they provide the most accurate estimates of what is true in the population. Second, considerable attention is paid to the issue of sampling. In essence, survey researchers ask their participants (who are often called respondents in survey research) to report directly on their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. First, the variables of interest are measured using self-reports. Survey research is a quantitative and qualitative method with two important characteristics. Describe several different ways that survey research can be used and give some examples.Define what survey research is, including its two important characteristics.
