Conceptual Model

Yesterday Chas emailed me the Conceptual map and we conversed about it, after that I read one of the articles that Diana sent us called Guidelines for Constructing a Survey by Cindy Passmore, MA; Alison E. Dobbie, MD; Michael Parchman, MD; and James Tysinger, PhD. I thought maybe reading this would greatly help our team develop a productive survey. So basically this article was about how to create a constructive survey, and the I learned that a survey should be easy to answer, can result in consistent data, and it can answer the main research question. The point of Surveys is to collect and gather information to find an answer to questions a researcher has. It is very important to develop a good survey otherwise we would have unsatisfactory or incomplete results. There are limitations to surveys because some are based on the subject's honesty and memory or it could be that they have little understanding of the question which is why we have to be clear about the questions we come up with. There are 3 different types of surveys mentioned in this article: Descriptive Surveys which to my understandings, deals with facts and opinions; Explanatory Survey which tries to find the cause and effect of certain situations; and lastly, Unidimensional and Multidimensional Scales which deals with multiple constructs.There are different ways to go about the survey, one is to do one on one interview or a telephone survey which is much expensive and time consuming although you collect more data this way. Another way is to give out surveys for subjects to fill out through mail. This way is less expensive yet results in less data because of incomplete surveys or no one takes the surveys.

Steps in developing a survey:

1. State the problem
2. Plan the project
3. State the research question
4. Review the literature
5. Develop/adapt survey items
6. Construct the survey
7. Pilot test the draft survey
8. Administer the survey

These steps were very helpful to us, we've already stated our problem which was that the separation of churches affect the youth negatively, we've planned out our project by doing our project goal outline, we've reviewed some literature on how to come up with surveys. We haven't pass the other steps because we are just working on the foundation of this project.