Activity . hypothesise that as the hours of study time increase, the number of hours spent in other activities will decrease. Here, you are expecting a negative correlation, ranging between and – . .
It is also possible that sometimes no correlation may exist between the two variables. This is called zero correlation . Generally, it is difficult to find zero correlation but the correlations found may be close to zero, e.g., -. or +.
. This indicates that no significant relationship exists between two variables or the two variables are unrelated. Survey Research You may have read in the newspapers or seen on the television that during elections surveys are conducted to find out if people would vote for a particular political party, or favour a particular candidate. Survey research came into existence to study opinions, attitudes and social facts.
Their main concern initially was to find out the existing reality or baseline. So they were used to find out facts such as the literacy rate at a particular time, religious affiliations, income level of a particular group of people, etc.They were also used to find out the attitude of people towards family planning, the attitude towards giving powers to the panchayati raj institutions for running programmes related to health, education, sanitation, etc. However, they have now evolved into a sophisticated technique which helps in inferring various kinds of causal relationships. Box .
provides an example of a study using the survey method. The survey research uses different techniques for collecting information. Included among these techniques are: personal interviews, questionnaires, telephonic surveys, and controlled observations. These techniques are discussed here in some detail.
Personal Interviews The interview method is one of the most frequently used methods for obtaining information from people. It is used in diverse kinds of situations. It is used by a doctor to obtain information from the patient, an employer when meeting a prospective employee, a sales person interviewing a housewife to know why she uses a certain brand of soap. On television, we often see media persons interviewing people on issues of national and international importance.
What happens in an interview? We see that two or more persons sit face-to-face with each In December , a survey was conducted by “Outlook Saptahik” magazine ( January ) to know what makes the people of India happy. The survey was conducted in eight big cities, namely Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, and Ranchi. persons in the age group of - years participated in the study.
The questionnaire used in the survey contained different types of questions. The first question (Are you happy?) required respondents to give their views on a -point scale ( =extremely happy, =more or less happy, =neither happy nor unhappy, =more or less unhappy, =extremely unhappy). About per cent people reported that they were extremely happy, per cent were more or less happy, per cent said they were neither happy .