The Weimar/Russia Comparison

Research methodology in the information age: A comparison of two survey techniques.Survey research started in the 1930's when the "big three" pioneer commercial polling organizations went door to door gathering data to predict presidential elections, women's rights, or other timely topics of interest (Glenn, 1995).Seventy years later, as we enter the 21st century, technology has propelled survey research into new arenas of data collection.What was once a tedious, labor intensive process with various interviewer and responder effects has now become more user friendly entailing fewer biases.One of the most important innovations for telephone surveys was random digit dialing.This technology increased the effectiveness of telephone sampling and implementation.Shangraw (1986, p. 108) reported, "The University of Wisconsin's Survey Research Laboratory estimated that an experienced computer assisted telephone interview (CATI) interviewer's productivity may be as much as 20% higher than that of the same interviewer using traditional survey methods."This technology, along with various other changes in survey research, will continue to change the way universities,