Surveys as conversations between makers and takers: A conversational framework for assessing and responding to community needs

Abstract

Surveys, commonly employed in the social and behavioral sciences, are practical tools that can be used to assess the needs and attitudes of a given population. If not implemented in thoughtful ways, however, surveys can be inefficient or even harmful. With surveys often informing critical policy decisions, survey administrators must make careful methodological choices in order to obtain meaningful results and make sound decisions. In this paper, we review the social scientific literature on survey administration to aid policymakers, practitioners, and other survey administrators in understanding their position, identifying their participants, and establishing a plan for their surveys. We provide an overarching framework for survey design, guided by the idea that surveys are conversations between administrators and participants, in order to help creators of surveys make better decisions and engage more effectively with the communities they serve.