Doing a survey is not an easy task if you want accurate results, as CIS Professor Charles Balch discovered while writing his dissertation for his PhD in research and leadership. There are numerous things to consider while planning a survey, i.e. wording, how long, instructions, analysis, increasing response rates, what it means, etc. These are the sorts of things that he discusses in his new book, Internet Survey Methodologies, which was released on May 1st.

Since survey methodology is fairly new to the body of knowledge, Professor Balch began by doing a lot of research on…well, researching. There are polls everywhere on the internet, but how do we know they are reliable? There are also several types of polls; political, marketing, relational, opinion, etc. Most of these surveys are not very legitimate. For example, the political arena uses the push survey method quite a bit. These are disguised as surveys, but they are not about finding opinion, but rather to give you one. One of the main factors he found is that internet surveys give much more extreme results than on paper. People are more apt to rush through internet survey without much thought so you end up with high and low ends of the spectrums.

Some of the highlights of Professor Balch’s book is that there is not a big response rate for surveys. “Most people who do surveys think theirs is the most interesting or important thing in the world; most people disagree,” he said with a chuckle. Also, he said “people lie. People will not say what they really feel or believe, but say what they want the survey to show.” One example he gives is the Neilson survey that records what shows people are watching. People will turn on their TV and then go out to eat or just leave it on for background noise while they are busy in the other room. This does not give a true representation of what people actually watch or the kind of shows they would rather see.

While writing his book, Professor Balch also wrote an open source internet survey system which provides tools to create and analyze online survey instruments. Most item types are supported and the data is organized so that you can export it for further analysis with tools like Excel and SPSS. This is available through birat.net, short for Balch Internet Research and Analysis Toolkit.

“If you want to have a survey with good response rate and accurate information,” Professor Balch said “the single most important thing is to convince people that their response is going to bring about change.”

You can purchase Professor Balch’s book, Internet Survey Methodologies, through Amazon.com.