===========
NONRESPONSE
===========

* once you have contacted the students, how will they respond?
  surveymonkey?  email answers back to you? meet them for face to face
  interviews?  etc.

*  whatever the method, nonresponse will be a big issue.

  - Face to face interviews make for great response rates but would be
    at least very time consuming to carry out.

  - if you could get a student phone book from each campus, you could
    conduct a phone survey.  this might be effective at getting better
    response rates but not use up a ton of your time.

  - if you could get a list of email addresses for each campus, you
    could conduct an email or email-and-web survey. 

  - for email/web surveys nonresponse will be a bigger issue.

    - for email and web surveys, get only about 25% or less response
      rate.  

    - how can you improve this with followup and/or prenotification
      (e.g. postcards)?  how many times, and how, will you followup?

  - who responds, who doesn't?  how would this affect biases in your
    results?

  - if you are stuck with low response rate, what would you need to
    know or be able to do, to argue either 
      1. the sample you got is still like a representative probability
         sample; or 
      2. you know what adjustments to make so that the sample can be
         treated as a representative probability sample

================
MORE NONRESPONSE
================


  - can you think of things you can do, or offer, or ..., when you
    first notify an establishment that it is in your sample, that will
    increase their motivation to participate?

  - if you fail to contact an establishment that is in your sample the
    first time you try, how (and how many times) will you followup?

  - who responds, who doesn't?  how would this affect biases in your
    results?

----

  - looking at administrative records (past real estate sales)
    probably generates the lowest nonresponse or missing information

  - nonresponse is usually also very low for in-person interviews, but
    these are more time-consuming to prepare for and conduct

  - telephone interviews are a better tradeoff between effort and
    response rate, if you can get a good list of telephone numbers
    (sampling frame) that cover your target population


==============
SAMPLING FRAME
==============

CBOOK


===================
UNANSWERED QUESTION
===================

* pls answer carefully for I.2

* Since you answered ABC from the shorter project outline you haven't
  answered this yet.

* Since you answered a-e or a-f from the longer project outline you
  haven't answered this yet.


TARGET POP

  - as you can see above, different sorts of research questions on the
    same topic could lead to very different target populations!

  - please specify the target population very clearly.  "CMU students"
    is not clear enough.  "Students at the main CMU campus who are
    currently freshman, sophomores, juniors, or seniors (4th or 5th
    year)" probably is clear enough. 

SAMPLING FRAME

* The sampling frame should either be a list of students that you can
  take a random sample from, or a set of students that are well
  defined by actions you take (e.g. all students that pass by the
  fence between times X and Y on days A, B and C -- not necessarily a
  great frame [undercoverage?] but an example of a frame that is not a
  list).

MODE OF DATA COLLECTION

* Relying on two methods (rather than just one) for contacting
  students is a good idea, you will capture more students that way.

  However, it is not enough to send email to "everyone" or to post a
  generic invitation on facebook to participate in your survey:
  students who respond to a general invitation are different from
  those who do not respond; they may have different attitudes about
  dining as well.

* once you have contacted the students, how will they respond?  Will
  you set up a webpage (surveymonkey?) for them to go to [less work
  for you but a lower response rate]?  Will they put their answers in
  an email back to you [higher response rate but potentially more work
  to extract answers out of emails]?  Will you arrange to meet with
  them face to face?  Etc.


VARIABLES

* please carefully list these variables, and why you would collect
  them (what would you do with the information, how might they be
  related to each other, etc.) for I.2

================
SAMPLE QUESTIONS
================

* we will talk about question formats later in the course.  this will
  help you refine your questions.