This paper presents best practices for conducting survey research using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Readers will learn the benefits, limitations, and trade-offs of using MTurk as compared to other recruitment services, including SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics. A synthesis of survey design guidelines along with a sample survey are presented to help…

Every year the U.S. Department of Education reports for each state in the country the grade levels, subject areas, and geographic areas that have experienced teacher shortages (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, 2015). A teacher shortage occurs when the number of teachers available in a specific grade, subject matter…

Survey sampling is fundamentally an applied field. The goal in this book is to put an array of tools at the fingertips of practitioners by explaining approaches long used by survey statisticians, illustrating how existing software can be used to solve survey problems, and developing some specialized software where needed. This book serves at least…

Policy interest in international surveys on Adult Learning (AL) has increased strongly. AL survey data are used as benchmarks for a country's educational system. However, results of key indicators like participation in learning activities often vary remarkably between different data sources. Stating that these differences are due to varying…

The Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) will establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure that the survey design and implementation processes of PIAAC yield high-quality and internationally comparable data. This document provides a revised version of the technical standards and guidelines originally…

Creating a survey that asks the right questions at a level appropriate for the intended audience is a difficult task. This guide is designed to support educators who want to be confident that the data they gather will be useful. The guide is organized according to the developmental steps in creating a survey. Individual chapters correspond to the…

This survey was developed in 1991 by Marilyn Gillespie, David Spener, and JoAnn Crandall at the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL), and was used for a 2-year project with funding from the National Center for Adult Literacy, established at the University of Pennsylvania by the U.S. Department of Education. The survey was used to collect…

In spite of the increased use of the Internet for data collection, there is little published research about the process of data collection online. That is, discipline specific studies publish the results of their web-based surveys in discipline-specific journals, but little information is available on the process of Internet-based data collection.…

Using qualitative and quantitative methods in a single research project has been the subject of controversy. Purists argue that qualitative and quantitative approaches derive from different, mutually exclusive epistemologic and ontologic assumptions, and cannot be combined. Situationalists focus on methodology and assume that data collection and…

This monograph for institutional researchers on questionnaire survey research aims to be both a guide to the basic steps of survey research and a useful reference tool. The monograph is in an informal, question and answer format and organized around the various steps of the survey research process. Chapter I discusses planning the survey including…

The Project on Secondary Analysis directed its attention to methodology and policy issues, focusing on reanalysis of existing data (1979-82)--surveys, program evaluations, etc.--as a vehicle for learning how to improve methods of obtaining and analyzing data, designing program evaluations, and constructing policy to enhance the quality and utility…

Many organizations and agencies collect data related to postsecondary education. To improve the coordination of data definitions and surveys, guidelines have been prepared to define the best survey practices for data collectors and data providers. The first section of this document, "Best Practices for Data Collectors," covers the…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the utility of mark-sense readers in locally produced evaluations. The term mark-sense reader refers to a class of electronic devices that convert marks made on a paper sheet to electronic information by means of either electrical or optical sensing of the marks. The most common use of mark-sense readers has…

A national survey of 1000 parents concerning disciplinary practices and violence included questions about whether the children had been sexually abused, to assess the feasibility of epidemiological research on contemporaneous sexual abuse using parental interviews rather than the usual adult retrospective approach. Results indicated rates of…

The nine-volume Survey Kit is designed to help readers prepare and conduct surveys and become better users of survey results. All the books in the series contain instructional objectives, exercises and answers, examples of surveys in use, illustrations of survey questions, guidelines for action, checklists of "dos and don'ts," and…