Social Science Basics: Conducting Interviews & Writing Survey Questions

About this event

The social sciences are a valuable but often overlooked element of coastal zone managment. Issues from marsh restoration to flood mitigation all involve understanding critical human elements - knowledge, values, and attitudes - of the people who live, work, and play in these areas. This workshop is taught by NOAA's Office for Coastal Management.

The Conducting Interviews Module will provide participants with the knowledge to create an "interview guide" tool and conduct effective interviews that can be used in multiple resource management settings.

The Writing Effective Survey Questions Module serves to provide coastal managers with best practices to write more effective surveys. Surveys are a popular information collection tool to help coastal managers understand their stakeholders and quickly assess large populations, but poorly designed surveys yield questionable results.

Workshop Objectives

Participants will learn how to:

• Recognize three types of interviews, as well as their purposes, strengths, and limitations
• Construct an interview guide using best practices for question construction and sequencing
• Design and conduct a mock interview, ensuring that all components are included
• Critique mock interviews and identify best practices and common pitfalls for execution of an interview
• Review and critique surveys, and identify common mistakes in question design
• Incorporate 25 best practices when creating survey questions
• Create appropriate question layout and design
• Identify ways to improve survey questions that yield desired data types

Workshop Format

This is a virtual workshop. It is one of 3 modules in a series on Social Science Basics for Coastal Managers. The other two are Understanding Stakeholders and Analyzing Qualitative Data. Registration in one does not guarantee registration in the other 2 modules. You must sign up for each individually. You do not have to sign up for the first one to understand the others. Sign up for the topics you are interested in.