MSR4survey

In Andhra Pradesh, the Vidhan Sabha, or Legislative Assembly, has 294 constituencies. 48 constituencies are reserved for theScheduled Castes candidates and 19 constituencies are reserved for the Scheduled tribes candidates.

Uses of Surveys

This guide is intended to ensure that surveys conducted in the OAG meet reasonable requirements and expectations of survey professionals as well as the VFM audit standards of the Office of the Auditor General. The use of the terms "must" and "should" in this guidance document do not necessarily have the status of OAG standards and policies. However, they reflect methodological requirements and expectations in the conduct of surveys.

Introduction

The chief advantage of surveys is that they allow the auditor to make aggregate statements on a topic relevant to audit objectives; for example, "Overall, there has been a loss of resources to ..." or, "A quarter of managers had difficulty distinguishing between..."

Two key preconditions for making general statements are the following:

the use of a sample that allows an unbiased estimate of the situation about which the general statement will be made; and

the use of a standardized approach and questions to all members of the sample surveyed.

Generalizing to a population

One of the most common purposes of a survey is to allow the auditor to reach a general conclusion (generalize) about a population on a topic relevant to audit objectives. This is a useful approach when the significance of a condition depends upon how widespread the condition is, for example on how frequently certain deficiencies in human resource management practices occur in an organization. When individual instances may in and of themselves be significant, other approaches, such as case studies may be more appropriate. For example, in examining controls over operations in a given program area, there may be a few operations that involve significant physical hazards for the public or employees, warranting individual attention.

In generalizing to a population, it is vital that the survey uses a representative sample of the entire population. Surveys of this type are only feasible where the relevant population of interest can be clearly identified and a means exists to identify individual members of the population for the purposes of sampling. In the case of a small population, it may be feasible to get an unbiased measure by accessing the entire population (census), if identifiable.

When is a survey appropriate?

Surveys of individuals may request a variety of information, such as the following:

the characteristics of the respondent (e.g. age, position within an organization, education or other qualifications, etc.);

prior or current actions (what they have done in the past);

the reasons for actions;

factual information related to the program (expenditures, management practices);

satisfaction with policies, programs and practices; and

views regarding the effectiveness of programs or practices.

The data collection techniques employed in surveys of individuals are similar to audit interviews or management representations (when information is obtained from managers) in that they represent respondents' views regarding facts. Therefore, they may require corroboration to confirm the existence of factual situations. It may be difficult to ask corroborating questions as part of questionnaires and structured interviews. Therefore, additional techniques may be required to obtain corroboration. Where independent corroboration is considered essential, other techniques, such as case studies or document review, may be preferable. In some cases it may be possible to combine a survey approach with other approaches. For example, a survey questionnaire may ask respondents to provide corroborating documentation for review by the auditor.

Public opinion polls and marketing surveys conducted by others have asked respondents about their response to hypothetical or future situations, e.g. what they would buy under given circumstances or how they will vote. It is very difficult to corroborate individual responses to hypothetical situations. Therefore, great caution must be exercised in the use of hypothetical questions in surveys.

Many of the considerations that apply to the design and use of questionnaires, structured interviews and samples in surveying individuals apply to the use of these techniques for other purposes as well. Consideration should be given to consulting the FRL for surveys in these circumstances.

For instance, questionnaires and structured interviews may be used for other purposes than generalizing to a larger population. They may be used to obtain information from program staff, management or clientele in a particular location as part of a case study or series of case studies. Or, they may be used to identify suitable recommendations regarding deficiencies revealed by an audit.

Rather than obtaining information from individuals, survey techniques may also be used to make general statements based on examination of documents, direct observations and items on data bases. For example, a survey of all program evaluation reports produced by departments and agencies over a seven-year period resulted in general statements about the types of evaluation issues addressed within that time frame. The Office frequently surveys information about transactions, such as loans, contracts, payments to personnel, contained in department and agency data bases.

Practical considerations

It is not possible for surveys to provide the breadth and depth of information available from case studies and audit interviews. Consequently, use of a survey to generalize to a larger population requires careful planning and specification of the information to be collected. This can only be accomplished when sufficient knowledge exists to develop a standard set of questions that can be administered in a standard fashion. For these reasons, surveys are best suited when matters of potential significance have already been well elaborated and the survey can be well focused.

Because of the amount of planning involved, surveys require several months from the time planning is started until final results are available, and they can be resource intensive. The development cost will be greater the less well understood the issue area, the greater the difficulty in identifying individual population members for sampling, and the more complex the issue area to be examined.

When to use a survey

Surveys are most useful and efficient when

significance depends upon the frequency and extent to which a condition occurs in the population being studied

the population of interest can be clearly defined and individual members identified for the purposes of sampling

matters of potential significance have been well elaborated so that the survey can be well focused

independent corroboration of each individual's responses is not required

several months are available to plan, conduct and analyze the survey

Other approaches, such as audit interviews, case studies, and document review are often better suited when

significance can be demonstrated by identification of deficiencies in a few important cases

the issue area is less well understood

identifying matters of potential significance

independent corroboration of each individual's responses is required

time frame for the audit is extremely short (less than five to six months)

Survey : Question Designs

Question Design

It is important to design questions very carefully. A poorly designed questionaire renders results meaningless. There are many factors to consider. Babbie gives the following pointers:

Make items clear (don't assume the person you are questioning knows the terms you are using).

Avoid double-barreled questions (make sure the question asks only one clear thing).

Respondent must be competent to answer (don't ask questions that the respondent won't accurately be able to answer).

Questions should be relevant (don't ask questions on topics that respondents don't care about or haven't thought about).

Short items are best (so that they may be read, understood, and answered quickly).

Avoid negative items (if you ask whether librarians should not be paid more, it will confuse respondents).

Avoid biased items and terms (be sensitive to the effect of your wording on respondents).

Busha and Harter provide the following list of 10 hints:

Unless the nature of a survey definitely warrants their usage, avoid slang, jargon, and technical terms.

Whenever possible, develop consistent response methods.

Make questions as impersonal as possible.

Do not bias later responses by the wording used in earlier questions.

As an ordinary rule, sequence questions from the general to the specific.

If closed questions are employed, try to develop exhaustive and mutually exclusive response alternatives.

Insofar as possible, place questions with similar content together in the survey instrument.

Make the questions as easy to answer as possible.

When unique and unusual terms need to be defined in questionnaire items, use very clear definitions.

Use an attractive questionnaire format that conveys a professional image.

As may be seen, designing good questions is much more difficult than it seems. One effective way of making sure that questions measure what they are supposed to measure is to test them out first, using small focus groups.

Survey : Instrument Design

Instrument Design

One criticism of library surveys is that they are often poorly designed and administered (Busha and Harter 1980), resulting in data that is that is not very accurate, but that is energetically quoted and used to make important decisions. Surveys should be just as rigourously designed and administered as any other research method. Meyer (1998) has identified five preliminary steps that should be taken when embarking upon any research project: 1) choose a topic, 2) review the literature, 3) determine the research question, 4) develop a hypothesis, and 5) operationalization (i.e., figure out how to accurately measure the factors you wish to measure). For research using surveys, two additional considerations are of prime importance: representative sampling and question design. Much of the following information was taken from the book Research Methods in Librarianship: Techniques and Interpretation by Charles H. Busha and Stephen P. Harter.

Representative Sampling

A sample is representative when it is an accurate proportional representation of the population under study. If you want to study the attitudes of UT students regarding library services, it would not be enough to interview every 100th person who walked into the library. That technique would only measure the attitudes of UT students who use the library, not those who do not. In addition, it would only measure the attitudes of UT students who happened to use the library during the time you were collecting data. Therefore, the sample would not be very representative of UT students in general. In order to be a truly representative sample, every student at UT would have to have had an equal chance of being chosen to participate in the survey. This is called randomization.

If you stood in front of the student union and walked up to students, asking them questions, you still would not have a random sample. You would only be questioning students who happened to come to campus that day, and further, those that happened to walk past the student union. Those students who never walk that way would have had no chance of being questioned. In addition, you might unintentionally be biased as to who you question. You might unconsciously choose not to question students who look preoccupied or busy, or students who don't look like friendly people. This would invalidate your results, since your sample would not be randomly selected.

If you took a list of UT students, uploaded it onto a computer, then instructed the computer to randomly generate a list of 2 percent of all UT students, then your sample still might not be representative. What if, purely by chance, the computer did not include the correct proportion of seniors, or honors students, or graduate students? In order to further ensure that the sample is truly representative of the population, you might want to use a sampling technique called stratification. In order to stratify a population, you need to decide what sub-categories of the population might be statistically significant. For instance, graduate students as a group probably have different opinions than undergraduates regarding library usage, so they should be recognized as separate strata of the population. Once you have a list of the different strata, along with their respective percentages, you could instruct the computer to again randomly select students, this time taking care that a certain percentage are graduate students, a certain percentage are honors students, and a certain percentage are seniors. You would then come up with a more truly representative sample.

Types of Surveys

Data are usually collected through the use of questionnaires, although sometimes researchers directly interview subjects. Surveys can use qualitative (e.g. ask open-ended questions) or quantitative (e.g. use forced-choice questions) measures. There are two basic types of surveys: cross-sectional surveys and longitudinal surveys. Much of the following information was taken from an excellent book on the subject, called Survey Research Methods, by Earl R. Babbie.

Cross-Sectional Surveys

Cross-sectional surveys are used to gather information on a population at a single point in time. An example of a cross sectional survey would be a questionaire that collects data on how parents feel about Internet filtering, as of March of 1999. A different cross-sectional survey questionnaire might try to determine the relationship between two factors, like religiousness of parents and views on Internet filtering.

Longitudinal Surveys

Longitudinal surveys gather data over a period of time. The researcher may then analyze changes in the population and attempt to describe and/or explain them. The three main types of longitudinal surveys are trend studies, cohort studies, and panel studies.
Trend Studies

Trend studies focus on a particular population, which is sampled and scrutinized repeatedly. While samples are of the same population, they are typically not composed of the same people. Trend studies, since they may be conducted over a long period of time, do not have to be conducted by just one researcher or research project. A researcher may combine data from several studies of the same population in order to show a trend. An example of a trend study would be a yearly survey of librarians asking about the percentage of reference questions answered using the Internet.
Cohort Studies

Cohort studies also focus on a particular population, sampled and studied more than once. But cohort studies have a different focus. For example, a sample of 1999 graduates of GSLIS at the University of Texas could be questioned regarding their attitudes toward paraprofessionals in libraries. Five years later, the researcher could question another sample of 1999 graduates, and study any changes in attitude. A cohort study would sample the same class, every time. If the researcher studied the class of 2004 five years later, it would be a trend study, not a cohort study.
Panel Studies

Panel studies allow the researcher to find out why changes in the population are occurring, since they use the same sample of people every time. That sample is called a panel. A researcher could, for example, select a sample of UT graduate students, and ask them questions on their library usage. Every year thereafter, the researcher would contact the same people, and ask them similar questions, and ask them the reasons for any changes in their habits. Panel studies, while they can yield extremely specific and useful explanations, can be difficult to conduct. They tend to be expensive, they take a lot of time, and they suffer from high attrition rates. Attrition is what occurs when people drop out of the study.

Use surveys to measure customer satisfaction

Many organizations have a hard time determining whether their projects are successful or not. A couple of these success criteria are obvious -- your actual end date versus your initial deadline date and your actual project spending versus your initial project budget. But is that all there is?

Another measure that should be a part of your success criteria is a customer satisfaction rating. Some people would say that you should just ask the client if they were satisfied. However, the better approach is to have a formal survey that is given to the major client stakeholders at the end of a project. Surveys are by their nature qualitative. In other words, they capture perceptions -- not hard facts. However, if you're trying to understand customer satisfaction, the data is by it nature subjective. Surveys are the best way to capture this subjective information.

Many surveys ask for a combination of ratings feedback and written feedback. The numerical answers are used to drive the metrics, while the written feedback provides additional perspective that can be used in the metrics analysis. There are a number of advantages to a well-worded survey.

It allows you to quantify the subjective perceptions of the clients by asking them to convert their perceptions into a numerical rating. The ratings then help the project team better understand how they performed.

It is relatively painless for both the client and the project team.

It allows you to capture feedback on a core group of questions that can be compared from project to project -- assuming that you ask the same set of questions each time.

You can get "shades of gray" from the rating feedback. A survey allows you to receive answers based on a continuum or a range of possible results. For instance, instead of asking a yes/no question, you can ask a client to quantify his perception on a 1-5 scale.

Of course, one disadvantage is that you won't typically end up with a high percentage of surveys returned. In fact, you should be happy to receive 50% back, and return rates of 25% and lower are not uncommon. However, if you send a survey to ten clients, your familiarity with them will hopefully result in a majority being completed.

Many, perhaps most, surveys are not very good, and therefore the information returned is suspect. When you create your survey, make sure that you use the following techniques:

Make it easy for people to fill in answers. This includes giving them enough space to write comments.

Make the rating scale simple and consistent. For instance, if you use a 1-5 rating scale, define the scale first and then use it consistently on the survey.

If you have multiple choice answers, or a drop-down list, make sure all possible answers are represented, and offer an option for the user to write "not applicable."

Don't ask biased or leading questions. Just ask the question -- don’t add a commentary.

Don’t have one statement that includes two questions. For instance, "Are you happy with the timeliness and format of the report?" These questions should be asked separately.

There's usually some debate about whether participants should identify themselves or not. Asking for identification may make it easier to ask follow-up questions gain better clarity on the responses. However, it may also inhibit feedback and may result in some people not responding at all. I recommend you include a line for the name, but that you make it optional.

Surveys have their place. They are the most effective way of getting perception-based data. They should be used at the end of a project to determine the client’s satisfaction with the project deliverables and the project team’s performance.

Why Census is important?

The Indian Census is the most credible source of information on Demography (Population characterstics), Economic Activity, Literacy and Education, Housing & Household Amenities, Urbanisation, Fertility and Mortality, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, Language, Religion, Migration, Disability and many other socio-cultural and demographic data since 1872. Census 2011 will be the 15th National Census of the Country. This is the only source of primary data in the village ,town and ward level, It provides valuable information for planning and formulation policies for Central and the State Governments and is widely used by National and International Agencies, Scholars, business people, industrialists, and many more.

The Delimitation/reservation of Constituencies- Parliamentary/Assembly/Panchayats and other Local Bodies is also done on the basis of the demographic data thrown up by the Census. Census is te basis for reviewing the country's progress in the past decade, monitoring the on going Schemes of the Goverment and most importantly , plan for the future. That is why the Slogan is " Our Census - Our Future".

Andhra Pradesh : Housing Profile

at a glance (pdf)

Thursday, 11 October 2012

Ayyadevara Kaleswara Rao (1956–1962)

B. V. Subba Reddy (1962–1970)

Kona Prabhakara Rao (1980–1981)

Tangi Satyanarayana (1983–1985)

D. Sripada Rao (1991–1995)

Yanamala Rama Krishnudu (1995–1999)

K. Pratibha Bharati (1999–2004)

K R Suresh Reddy (2004–2009)

Nallari Kiran Kumar Reddy (2009–2010)

Nadendla Manohar (2011–2012)

Introduction

Generalizing to a population

When is a survey appropriate?

Practical considerations

When to use a survey

Question Design

Instrument Design

Representative Sampling

Types of Surveys

Cross-Sectional Surveys

Longitudinal Surveys

Trend Studies

Cohort Studies

Panel Studies