The Benefits And Challenges of Surveys

ARTICLE

I have learned that surveys, when conducted correctly, have much value. Properly conducted polls have the opportunity to gain valuable insight on public opinion issues, gage awareness, measure attitudes, identify key publics, recognize consumer trends and set social norms. However, the true value of surveys can only be discovered when they are well designed, organized and generalizable. Challenges arise when these three conditions of a good survey are not applied. It is in these situations that we find such surveys as the pseudo poll which was presented earlier in this paper; invalid, unrealizable and nonprobable these sort of polls create distrust of surveys as a means of scientific research. Additionally, surveys are limited in the information they are able to collect. Unlike in person, or over the phone interviews, there is no way to gage facial or vocal inflection in the surveyors' responses. A lack of time, money and resources often prevent the inclusion of open-ended questions in surveys, further limiting the amount of data one is able to receive.