Writing survey questions

Decide on a topic (or topics) to investigate. Ask students to work in small groups to write a collection of survey questions to gather data about the topic.

Reinforce the importance of constructing questions that are unbiased and that collect the data needed. Students could consider the following questions.

Which of the following statements and questions are most appropriate and why?

• I am not in favour of stopping students from eating their lunches on the playground. What do you think?
• Since our team won the state boys' championship, we should put more funds into girls' sport so they can win one too. Do you agree?
• How many times do you use your mobile phone each week?

If we wanted to find out the favourite sport of students in our class, which question would we ask?

• How many sports do you play?
• What sport do you play at recess?
• Which sport do you like the most?
• Do you play basketball?

Students can then use the online tool SurveyMonkey to construct the survey. They can administer the survey and use the data to answer the question.

There is more discussion in Misunderstanding samples and sampling.