Design the research study and specify the data to be collected. You now have a question that you must translate into a concrete study. Given your limited resources and time (issues that plague all...

Design the research study and specify the data to be collected. You now have a question that you must translate into a concrete study. Given your limited resources and time (issues that plague all social researchers!), you decide a survey would be the most efficient way to collect the data you need. To create your survey, you must operationalize your terms. For example, what qualifies as service or charitable work? Helping family members? Charity work completed to fulfill a requirement for a course? Do respondents have to be engaged in such work now, or can they have done it in the past? You must be clear about how you will measure these and all other variables in advance of your study. Once you’ve clarified your key terms, you’ll need to create a questionnaire, the specific set of questions that you will ask each person you survey. At this stage, you must also devise your sampling strategy—that is, determine who will receive your survey. Since this is a small school project, you will likely have to limit your study to students on your own campus. The results of your survey, therefore, will not accurately reflect the voting behavior of all young people, which limits your ability

to generalize your findings. Students on your campus are likely to be different from students elsewhere and will certainly be different from young people who do not attend college. But even for your small study, you need to make sampling decisions: How many students will you select for the study? How will you choose them? In addition, you will need to decide how you want to administer the survey—by mail, by phone, over the Internet, in face-to-face interviews, or any combination of these methods.