1. Surveys and questionnaires are the most common quantitative method used in communication research.
2. Often self-administered, surveys can be distributed in written format through the mail, web, or email, or interviewers can ask questions face-to-face or over the phone.
3. Research questions or hypotheses drive the survey or questionnaire design.
4. Existing and established questionnaires can be used in some instances; otherwise, the researcher has to develop the questionnaire.
5. Recall cues, or stimulus statements, are needed to direct or restrict participants' responses.
6. Open questions allow the respondent to use his or her own words in responding to a question or statement.
7. Closed questions are complete with standardized response sets; respondents choose from the responses provided by the researcher.
8. Many closed questions can be adequately responded to using a 5-point or 7-point Likert-type response scale, and must be exhaustive as well as mutually exclusive.
9. How the survey looks can affect if and how respondents will answer; it should be uncluttered and readable and respondents should be told explicitly how and where to mark their responses.
10. Before using the survey in a research project, it should be pilot tested, or pretested.
11. Response rate, or the number of people who respond after they have been contacted to participate, should not be confused with sample size.
12. An aspect of reliability central to questionnaires is internal reliability, or the degree to which multiple questions or items consistently measure the same construct.
13. Once collected, the researcher must analyze and interpret the data as a whole, rather than focusing on the responses of any individual.
14. Survey data are collected at one point in time, which weakens their predictive ability unless theoretical models have been developed before the survey data are collected.
