How To Do A Survey

How to Do a SurveySHMS 6th Grade Math

Turn on the radio, T.V., newspaper, or almost any website and you will often see the results from a survey. Many websites will ask you to participate in a survey.

Gathering information is an important way to help people make decisions. Before new products are created companies will ask for a survey to be done first.

Survey Says……

Surveys can help decide what needs changing, where money should be spent, what products to purchase, what problems there might be, or lots of other questions you may have at any one time.

The best part about surveys is that they can be used to answer any question about any topic.

Survey Says……

Step 1: create the questions

Step 2: ask questions

Step 3: tally the results

Step 4: present the results

Four steps to a successful survey:

What questions do you want answered? Examples: favorite food, music artist, video game system, etc.

◦ Sometimes these can be simple questions like:“What is your favorite color?”

For more complex questions you will need a questionnaire.

You will be creating a

questionnaire.

Step 1: Create the Questions

How to make a good questionnaire:

The first question is one you should ask yourself: “what do I hope to learn from asking the questions?”

This defines your objective The purpose, or why you are conducting the survey.

Start writing down the questions that you will ask.

Write down any questions that you think of, you can narrow them down later.

You should have a question that asks: Male or Female.

Step 1: Questionnaire

Types of Questions

◦ A survey question can be:

Open-ended (the person can answer in any way they want).

Close-ended (the person chooses from one of several options)


Types of Questions

Example: “What is your favorite color?”

o Open-ended: Someone may answer “yellow-green”, in which case you will need to have a category “yellow-green” in your results.

o Close-ended: With a choice of only 7 colors your work will be easier, but they may not be able to pick their exact favorite color.


Red Orange

Yellow Green

Blue Indigo

Violet Other

Look at each of your questions and decide if they should be open or close ended.◦ Take time to rewrite your questions◦ Look at your close-ended questions and write the best

answer options for them. (see the next 2 slides for ideas)

Open-ended questions will NOT be easy to put into a table or graph.

Make your questions close-ended and you will be able to present this data in a neat graph or chart.


Close-ended questions:◦ Examples:

How important is the natural environment to you?

Do you agree that school is important?

Gender: ______ Male ______ Female


Not Important

Somewhat Important

Very Important

Strongly Agree

Agree Disagree

Strongly Disagree

Close-ended questions Continued:

◦ An “other” category in case their choice is not listed.

What is your favorite color?

o A scaled question:

• The river is.....Polluted 1______2______3______4______5 Clean

o Numbered Answers: • How many days a week to you play video games? _______ Times


Red Brown

Blue Orange

Green Other

Now that you have your questions, go out and ask them! But who do you ask?

◦ If you are going to ask a small group you can ask everyone (called a census).

◦ If you want to survey a large group, you may not be able to ask everybody so you should ask a sample of the population (this is called a sampling).

For this project we will be sampling 20-30 6th graders at SHMS

Step 2: Ask the Questions

Now that you have finished asking questions, it is time to tally the results.

◦ By tally I mean add up. This usually involves lots of paperwork and computer work (excel is useful). For the “Favorite colors” you can write tally marks like this

(every 5th mark crosses the previous 4 marks, so you can easily see groups of 5, when finding your final totals)

Step 3: Tally the Results

The Results are?◦ You will need to set up a table before moving on to

step 4. The table will show the totals from tallying your surveys.

A table is a very simple way to show others the results. A table should have a title, so those looking at it understand what results the table shows:

You will be creating a table.

Step 3: Tally the Results

Now that you have your results, you will want to show them to other people in the best possible way.

◦ We will be using Graphs & Charts for this project

Step 4: Presenting the results

Line Graph – Used to show information that is somehow connected (such as change over time)

Line Graph

Bar Graph Bar Graph – Used to show relative sizes of

different results.

Pie Chart – Used most often to show survey data that is to be reported in percentages.

Pie Chart

You will be presenting your findings to the class.

You may use poster board, graph paper, or the computer for your presentation.

Be creative!

A presentation should be neat, organized, pleasant to look at and easy to read.

Final Presentation

You MUST have the following in your presentation:

Your data organized into a table.

Determine & include the: mean, median, mode and range for your set of data.

Represent the data in two different ways (i.e. line graph, bar graph, circle graph, etc.).

Be able to explain why you chose these representations and which works best for your set of data.

Explain which measure (mean, median or mode) shows the best representation of your data.

Be able to talk about your survey. i.e. – Why did you choose this topic? What did you learn about this topic? What did you learn about your peers?

Final Presentation

Education

How To Do A Survey