Field Survey Best Practices

¶ … soon be doing a field survey in a different module of the class for which this report is being prepared. With that in mind, the author has been asked to do a brief literature review about the subject of field surveys. A total of six acceptable and reputable sources will be consulted as part of this literature review. To keep things as academic and advanced as possible, the author of this report will stick to academic journals as the one and only type of acceptable source for information.

While field surveys may seem pretty basic to some, there are some best practices and guidelines that need to be learned and followed to the letter. Cited Sources Of course, there is a general dichotomy when it comes to our world and research is no exception. Indeed, there is the Western way of doing things and the Eastern way of doing things. The West is mostly represented by the United States/Canada, Western Europe and Australia.

On the other side of the coin is the East, which is dominated by China and a few other countries. While some may hold that field surveys, the handling of data analysis and so forth should be extremely consistent from the East to the West, this is not always the case. At the very least, there are those that bring certain methods and tactics into question. Even so, many would hold that there are indeed some methods and approaches that are "transferrable" in nature (Markofsky, 2014).

One parameter that needs to be figured out in advance of any field survey is sensitivity. Indeed, there are some surveys where little differences are not something that needs to be worried about to any high amount of detail. That being said, there are other field surveys where minimal differences and variances are of major importance (Schultz & Lance, 2015).

Other important factors to consider when it comes to field surveys is what is being surveyed, the number of survey sites that will be created and used and the protocols that will be in place for all of the above. In other words, it is very important to know what precisely is being sought, what precisely about that thing will be studied and how it will be studied.

Some potential survey sites will be more target-rich than others and the leader of such a survey needs to keep that in mind when writing up the proverbial plan of attack (Loos et al., 2015). Field surveys are also typically a blend of quantitative or qualitative data. In most cases, both can be important as the hard data (the what) can be just as important as the why or what people feel about the "what" and one has to speak to the people to know that.

Beyond that, the responses offered by the people interviewed have to be collected, synthesized and summarized as part of any field survey. A common tool of the trade when it comes to both data sets is the questionnaire. The form of the questions can range from scores along a number range, true/false or even open-ended questions. The last of those three are the hardest to analyze but they can fetter out feelings and details that more quantitative methods would not be able to garner (Majid et al., 2014).

It is also important to ensure that what should be measured is not missed (Koepfil et al., 2011). Finally, some brainstorming or other alternative forms of consideration may become necessary to truly make a field survey and its results as truly robust as they could or should be. However, how inventive and "out-of-the-box" one can be does vary based on the situation at hand (Brazel, Carpenter & Jenkins, 2010).

Conclusion If there is one takeaway from this literature review, it would be that there is certainly more than one way to do any given field survey or any other type of research. The level of precision, detail, geographical distribution, type of analysis and so forth would all depend on what is wanted to be collected, what can be collected, what types of data that could/should be collected and so forth. All of this should be figured out before the survey begins. References Brazel, J. F., Carpenter, T.