From Luker's "data reduction and analysis" to my research survey questiond design

In addition to our discussion on the difference between Luker and Knight in yesterday's class, I was in fact doubting whether it was relevant to my final research proposal at the very beginning. After all, I will not be actually writing the real paper even when I am articulating that 6,500 words of research proposal. Why bothered to think about it at this point? As I mentioned in the class this week, Luker's readings always provide me inspiration. It doesn't disappoint me this time either. As I read through the entire chapter and reach to the exercise section, I finally realize Luker's codebooks content outline: "code name", "brief description", "when to use", "when not to use", and "example" (pp.215-216). Just like a fresh light crashing on the dark night sky, I suddenly realize that the "data reduction and analysis" can be essential guidelines for my own research survey design. While designing my research survey questions, I definitely need to think about what kind of information that can be rich enough for reducation and valuable enough for analysis. Whatever answers that I am hoping to generate from those questions have to be diverse enough for categorizing and meanwhile directly related to my research question. I am not sure if this is the so-call "reverse thinking", but it seems that I am up to something that I am still lack of a clear picture.

I am also reconsidering the content volume of my survey. My original plan was to design a survey with 20 questions that will contain 15 multiple choices and 5 open-ended questions. However, by the fact that it takes me up to 30minutes to answer 20 multiple choices, I begin to wonder if 5 open-ended questions will be too much or not. The survey questions are designed to be distributed online through Facebook. How long will my participants be willing to hang around on Facebook to answer my survey questions? Can they stay for 30 minutes, or even an hour? According to Luker, these days online survey only has 30-40% responses (pp.147). A friend of mine has over 200 "friends" under her Facebook account and she has distributed a survey containing only 10 multiple choices that takes me no more than 5 minutes to complete on Facebook. The result was that she only got 20 friends who responded to her survey questions. Maybe I should only recruit "volunteers" for my focus group interview but merely rely on financial initiatives to secure survey takers.