I’ve spent the past two days doing a lot of work for the dissertation, so please excuse my lack of posting for the last few days. I’ve got a lot to update you on, but I’ll start with getting my pre-interview survey online. While most of my data will consist of the interviews, I figured that a short survey could be used to capture some of the basic info that I needed about my subjects. These are all questions that I would ask anyways. This way, we can spend more of the interview time on the really interesting substantive topics. Also, this gives me a chance to get to know the subjects a little more and will provide me with some more information to ask questions about.
So yesterday, I stopped in the UCSB Social Science Survey Research Center to find out how to get my survey up and running on the internets. Well it turns out that even though I am a student, and the UCSB Survey Research center advertises that for students the service is available at a low cost or free, that to get my survey of 20 something questions that would be taken by no more than 50 people, it would cost me somewhere in the range of 150-200 bucks. I said, “thanks for your time,” and left. Now it’s not necessarily the center’s fault for having to charge grad students. Rather, when they came up with the idea of the center, the vision was a place that could bring in funding since they had all this technology to help whoever needed a survey put online. The way I understand it, that vision hasn’t come to be, and they are in the midst of revamping the thing to make it more accessible to students. To the director’s credit, he offered me several ways in which I might get the sociology department or UCSB to fund the thing, but given my timeline and the bureaucratic hoops that I would have to jump through, I figured that it would be more practical to just figure it out on my own.
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