Research Categories – Surveys

Although they don’t tell the whole story, surveys can provide a useful baseline for noting trends and informing debate, especially when they are supplemented with detailed case studies. Surveys provide useful data on the prevalence of different forms of digital media but they need to be interpreted with care. Although most surveys involve a lot of respondents, that isn’t always the case and it doesn’t necessarily mean that the claims are true. How did the researchers get the responses? Sometimes they use telephone interviews, sometimes they use members of the public who have been recruited – and paid - for this purpose.