Theory and Method of Public Administration

PA 705

Fall 2004

Style Sheet for Team Survey Project

The purpose of this assignments is to give you practice in developing and administering a survey, and in analyzing and reporting its results. Surveys are a very popular means for collecting information on people's attitudes and behavior, and many local governments use them to gauge the extent to which citizens are satisfied with city-provided services.  This project, unlike your prospectus, also provides you with the opportunity to collect original data, and analyze it using the quantitative and qualitative analytical techniques we discuss in class. Finally, it gives you practice in working as part of a team, figuring out the best way to distribute the work and to reach common agreement on findings and conclusions.

I will assign you to teams at the end of class on Sept. 22. You will have an opportunity to meet with your team during class on the 29th.  A draft of your survey instrument is due October 13, and your final, written report, is due on the last day of class.

Requirements

1. Decide on a topic for your survey. Once you have done this, your next step would be too look at what other research has been done on this topic. However, since I am requiring a literature review for your prospectus, I will allow you to skip that step for this assignment

2. Develop three hypotheses that can be tested with the survey. These should be phrased as a relationship between variables. For example, if your topic is the public's perceptions about the future viability of social security, your hypothesis might be "the younger the person, the greater their pessimism about social security."

3. Draft a brief survey instrument.  The instrument should include a maximum of 15 questions that can be used to test your hypotheses. These should include:

 Please also consult ORB chapter 7.  I also suggest that you pretest the survey by administering it to a few people (not on your team) and asking them whether the questions were clear, response categories comprehensive, etc. Please turn in your draft survey to me on Oct. 13 so I can make suggestions for improvement.

4. Identify survey population and select a sample.  Whose views do you need to get to test your hypotheses? In my social security case, they would need to be people from various age groups.   Normally, you would want to pull a random sample from your population of interest.  But for the purpose of this assignment, you can use a "convenience" sample, of people you know or otherwise can get access to. You should plan to survey 75-100 people.

5. Administer the survey. Decide whether you will do this verbally (e.g. over the phone, in person) or in writing (see ORB chapter 6).

6. Code and enter the data into a spreadsheet that can be analyzed using a statistical software package (e.g., SPSS)

7. Perform the analyses you need to do to test your hypotheses. These should include bivariate analysis (see ORB Chapter 12, 13). You may also want to use multivariate analysis such as multiple regression (see ORB chapter 14).  Be sure to also use tests of statistical significance. Technically, these don't mean much if your sample wasn't drawn randomly, but I would like you to practice using them.  Be sure to include discussion of the responses to your open-ended question.

8. Write up your results.  Your final write-up is due at the last class meeting.  This should be a paper, not to exceed 10 pages that includes

9. Complete the confidential team member evaluation form and e-mail it to me, or bring it to the last class meeting.

Grading

You will receive a team grade for the assignment, which will be based on:

Your individual grade may be raised or lowered based on the confidential team member evaluations provided by your teammates

Survey Teams