 The next logical step in data sourcing and making data is surveys. Now, think of this, if you want to know something, just ask. That's the easy way. And you want to do a survey under certain situations. The real question is, do you know your topic and your audience well enough to anticipate their answers to know what the range of their answers and the dimensions and the categories that are going to be important. If you do, then a survey might be a good approach. Now, just as there were a few dimensions for interviews, there's a few dimensions for surveys, you can do what's called a closed ended survey. That's also called a forced choice is where you give people just particular options like a multiple choice. You can have an open ended survey where you have the same questions for everybody, but you allow them to write in a free form response. You can do surveys in person. And you can also do them online or over the mail or phone or however. And now it's very common to use software when doing surveys. Some really common applications for online surveys are Survey Monkey and Qualtrics or at the very simple end, there's Google Forms and at the simple and pretty end, there's type form. There's a lot more choices, but these are some of the major players and how you can get data from online participants in survey format. Now, the nice thing about surveys is, you know, they're really easy to do. They're very easy to set up. And they're really easy to send out to large groups of people, you can get tons of data really fast. On the other hand, the same way that they're easy to do, they're also really easy to do badly. The problem is that the questions you ask, they can be ambiguous, they can be double barreled, they can be loaded. And the response scales can be confusing. So if you say, I never think this particular way in a person put strongly disagree, they may not know exactly what you're trying to get at. So you have to take special effort to make sure that the meaning is clear, unambiguous, and that the rating scale, the way that people respond is very clear, and they know where their answer falls, which gets us into one of the things about people behaving badly. And that is, beware the push pull. Now, especially during election time, like we're in right now, a push pull is something that sounds like a survey. But really what it is is a very biased attempt to get data just fodder for social media campaigns, or I'm going to make a chart that says that 98% of people agree with me. A push pull is one that's so biased, there's really only one way to answer to the questions. This is considered extremely irresponsible and unethical from a research point of view. Just hang up on them. Now, aside from that egregious violation of research ethics, you do need to do other things like watch out for bias, and the question wording, and the response options, and also in the sample selection, because any one of those can push your responses off one way or another, without you really being aware that it's happening. So in some let's say this about surveys, you can get lots of data quickly. On the other hand, requires familiarity with the possible answers in your audience. So you know sort of what to expect. And no matter what you do, you need to watch for bias to make sure that your answers are going to be representative of the group that you're really concerned about understanding.