Week 7: Survey Design

Hello, everyone. This Week, we are writing about our surveys.

Our topic is preventive health, and our survey questions have focused on this. The aspect of preventive health we are focusing on for assignment 2, is the "nanny state". Nanny State here referring to the government being overprotective and interfering with individual choice. It is my opinion that it should be part of the government's responsibility to provide basic health care for all citizens. The aspects that we as a group have researched include compulsory immunisation, taxation/subsidising unhealthy/healthy foods respectively, and social well being of the elderly. These are areas that require attention from the government.

Our survey design has concentrated on these three topics in particular. We have included questions on age and income and whether they think it's the government's responsibility to ensure the health of their population.  I personally am interested to see any correlation, if any, between these. Obviously, with a small sample size, it will be hard to draw any definitive conclusions, but it will be interesting nonetheless.

It seems people have all sorts of different opinions when it comes to health care. Some claim that health care is not a human right, (Barlow, 1999). The World Health Organization Constitution (2015) enshrines "the highest attainable standard of health as a fundamental right of every human being".

We have decided to target the general public for our survey, so we can expect a range of answers. We decided to use an electronic source for our survey, through Survey Monkey. We thought this would keep with modern times and be the easiest, most effective way to distribute our survey to the widest possible audience.

While there is no perfect sample size or best practice when it comes to surveys, (McColl, Jacoby, Thomas, Soutter, Bamford, Steen, & Bond, 2001), we still have to be aware of the small sample size and any bias we may encounter. Biases that may come from the way we've distributed the survey, which is through Facebook, to our friends, some of which may think the same way as us. It's up to us to interpret the data in a responsible and critical way.

We have been advised by our tutors that typically, surveys will aim for roughly 100 answers per question, but we are to aim for 10-15. In science, more is always better, so hopefully we can get plenty of responses.

We will be interpreting the data with Excel, which will allow us to form relevant tables and graphs that we can then use in our report. The use of closed questions, with yes or no answers, alongside questions with agree or disagree answers, will allow us to form a pretty good picture of what our sample thinks.

This has been an interesting experience for me. Our team has worked well together to achieve it. I look forward to seeing the data.

References:

Barlow, P. (1999). Health care is not a human right. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 319(7205), 321.

McColl, E., Jacoby, A., Thomas, L., Soutter, J., Bamford, C., Steen, N., ... & Bond, J. (2001). Design and use of questionnaires: a review of best practice applicable to surveys of health service staff and patients. Health Technology Assessment 5(31). http://10.3310/hta5310

World Health Organisation. (2015). Health and human rights. Retrieved from
www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs323/en/