Preparing Our Survey
In order to see what elements of social networking application are most important and will satisfy our users, we decided to use a qualitative method to investigate. For our application to be successful it has to fulfill our potential users. That’s why We decided to take their opinion on our design and the main functions that we would like to implement in the application and have their feedback to support the construction of this social network application.
We have to choose between two qualitative methods: interviews and surveys. To decide that we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of both:
Surveys:
*advantages:
Low cost, Scalability Speed results, User Anonymity and easy to analyse and easy to get ethical approval.
*Disadvantages
Sometimes dishonest, the difference in understanding, responses maybe unconscientious, skipped questions and have accessibility issues.
Interviews
*advantages:
Deep and expand questions, express emotions and feelings and suitable for complex and detailed topics.
*disadvantages:
biased answers, confirmation bias (the interviewer), time-consuming, not anonymous and smaller number of participants and its hard to get ethical approval due to personal information.
By weighing up between the two methods we decided to go for the survey since the time element is important for us, it is easier to conduct, it is free cost. Our topic is simple, the questions are simple too, we need more participants, and our sample are adults so most probably they would be able to fill the questionnaire.
A survey is more likely to elicit participation as participants can fill the survey at a convenient time to them, and we will not be asking any personal information.
We chose to design our survey on Google Forms, since they are simple and analyses responses automatically. Can help spreading the survey through email and other social media.
References:
Aldridge, A. and Levine, K. (2001) Surveying the Social World: Principles and Practice in
Survey Research. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Bell, J., Waters, S (1987). Doing your research project. McGraw Hill Education: New York.
Blaxter, L., Hughes, C. and Tight, M. (2010). How to research. 4th ed. Maidenhead, England: Open University Press, pp.223-225.