RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT 2

Research Assignment

I have participated in numerous surveys and interviews carried out by entities such as
business organizations and political research firms. The most recent one was a survey by a
political consulting firm working for one of the candidates in the coming elections. It was a
relatively short survey as I took less than five minutes to answer all the questions.
The researcher emailed me a questionnaire with multiple questions that I was to answer.
The email actually did not have the actual questionnaire. It simply introduced the researcher,
how he got my email, the purpose of the survey, and a request to participate in the survey. There
was a link that directed me to the website was the survey questions were.
Some of the questions required a simple yes or no answer, others had multiple choices to
choose from, while others were open ended with the interviewee allowed to give a more
comprehensive answer to a question. The questions sought to get information such as the
political candidate that I was going to vote for in the upcoming elections, the issue that I thought
was most important to voters, my level of satisfaction with the current office holder, and my
level of satisfaction with the general direction that the country was taking.
Given the nature of the questions and the fact that the research was conducted by a
political consultancy firm advising a candidate running for office, I believe the information was
used to gauge chances of the candidate winning, the kind of message they were to employ that
would resonate with voters, and voter subgroups to spend more resources wooing them.
Generally, the survey was meant to get information that the candidate was going to use to shape
the direction of his campaigns.