Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books Saylor.org
Nonetheless, “beating the streets” is still a legitimate way questionnaire data is collected. When the
U.S. Census Bureau collects data on the nation’s population, it hand delivers questionnaires to rural
households that do not have street-name and house-number addresses. And Census Bureau workers
personally survey the homeless to collect information about their numbers. Face-to-face surveys are
also commonly used in third world countries to collect information from people who cannot read or
lack phones and computers.
A plus of face-to-face surveys is that they allow researchers to ask lengthier, more complex questions
because the people being surveyed can see and read the questionnaires. The same is true when a
computer is utilized. For example, the researcher might ask the respondent to look at a list of ten
retail stores and rank the stores from best to worst. The same question wouldn’t work so well over
the telephone because the person couldn’t see the list. The question would have to be rewritten.
Another drawback with telephone surveys is that even though federal and state “do not call” laws
generally don’t prohibit companies from gathering survey information over the phone, people often
screen such calls using answering machines and caller ID.
Probably the biggest drawback of both surveys conducted face-to-face and administered over the
phone by a person is that they are labor intensive and therefore costly. Mailing out questionnaires is
costly, too, and the response rates can be rather low. Think about why that might be so: if you receive
a questionnaire in the mail, it is easy to throw it in the trash; it’s harder to tell a market researcher
who approaches you on the street that you don’t want to be interviewed.
By contrast, gathering survey data collected by a computer, either over the telephone or on the
Internet, can be very cost effective and in some cases free. SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang are two
Web sites that will allow you to create online questionnaires, e-mail them to up to one hundred
people for free, and view the responses in real time as they come in. For larger surveys, you have to
pay a subscription price of a few hundred dollars. But that still can be extremely cost effective. The
two Web sites also have a host of other features such as online-survey templates you can use to create
your questionnaire, a way to set up automatic reminders sent to people who haven’t yet completed