Who to study?

Given the objective the of the study,   it was obvious that married women would have to be the source of the desired information.    In research terms, the women became the respondents in the study.   Their responses to questions they were asked became the data of the investigation.   Incidentally, data are plural.   No one would base a study on the answer of a single respondent to a single question, which would produce a datum or just one bit of information.    In contrast, research is based on the collection and analysis of a body of data. The Sudan Fertility Survey, for example, was based on responses by more than 3,000 women to over 200 questions.   That's a lot of data.

With the decision made to collect data from married women, the researchers faced a new decision.   This was whether to collect data from all eligible women in northern Sudan or to limit data collection to some smaller number of women. All eligible women, those who were ever married and living in northern Sudan constituted the population being studied.    For the Sudan study, the population included over three million women, far too many to try to collect data from: Doing so would take too long and cost too much money. Knowing this, the researchers chose the alternative used in most social research. They selected only part of the population as the respondents for the study. This smaller set of women, called a sample, was selected so that the women in the sample were like the population in all important ways, such as being about the same ages, having the same levels of education, and having the same number of children. In Chapter 8 you will learn how samples are selected.

How to collect the data?

Next, the researchers had to decide how to collect the data from the sample of women. The method chosen was to conduct a survey based on personal interviews with each woman in the sample. With this decided, the investigators turned to developing the questions to be asked.   Stating the questions to be asked is a critical step in a planning a research project because, as in everyday life, the answer you get to any question you ask often depends on how the question was asked. Considerable care, therefore, was taken in framing each question. This task was made easier in the Sudan study because many of the questions used were used in previous studies of fertility in other countries.

Studies frequently require translation of questions into the language of the respondents. This was the case with the Sudan survey.   Questions, originally in English, were translated into Arabic, the language of the women who would be interviewed. This translation was    checked to make sure that the meaning of each question was not changed as a result of being translated. Checking was done by translating each question back from Arabic into English, and then by comparing the two English forms of each question. When the back translation agrees with the original language, the translation is considered safe to use. If the two forms differ, the process is checked to find the cause of the difference. In this case, English and Arabic versions of the questions were compared. Back translation, however, can be used with any set of languages.

After the researchers were certain that the translated questions asked what was intended, a small sample of women was interviewed to make sure that the women who would be interviewed in the main study would understand the questions and be able to answer them accurately.    Following this step, called a pretest, the questions were organized into a questionnaire.    As the name implies, a questionnaire is the final set of questions used to collect data from a sample.

Persons called interviewers were then trained to use the questionnaire to interview each woman included in the sample. In conducting interviews, each respondent was asked each question on the questionnaire and her answers were recorded by the interviewer.

So far we have discussed the typical elements of a social survey. A survey is one form of social research. Generally, surveys are based on data collection from a sample using a questionnaire.

Collecting the data

The collection of data, in this case the process of interviewing the respondents, lasted from December, 1978, to April, 1979, and resulted in completion of 3,115 questionnaires from eligible women. Reporting the time period for data collection is expected in research reports because reports are frequently published years after data are collected.

Therefore, it is important to tell when the data were collected. This is the only way readers can know how old the data are.