Quick question on Research!- survey based

[Gunneria]

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So, I am planning on doing derm summer research with a reputable derm person at my school...we basically can do research in anything (i.e.- lab research, clinical trials, etc...) and well I kind of don't want to overwhelm myself + having had plenty of research in labs, I'm honestly just looking for something laid back. So I wanted to hear your thoughts/experiences on a survey-based research project in derm.

Basically, in general, my project entails survey-based construction of a select group of dermatologists across country on a certain topic. Based on the analysis, the summer will actually be writing the paper. The survey obviously has a lag phase of several months in order to get approved/collect all the data (so this will probably be done over the school year but the survey will be completely online so not paper-based) and the actual data analysis and paper writing part will be done over the summer. Has anyone had any experience in this area and in essence, what I'm trying to gauge is should I go for it (time and workload-wise) over other avenues of research such as working in a lab, clinical research, working with a patient population, etc...?

Thanks.

 

[Dral]

Survey type projects can be pretty interesting. I don't know what your experience is with surveys, but they are more difficult than most people assume.

Make sure you do your time studying up on how to effectively create and administer the questionnaire. One has to be very careful about how you design questions, what to ask, when to ask it in the questionnaire, and how to get would be respondents to cooperate.

Even the graphic design on the page is important.

One thing to think of ahead of time, is your main questions and how you will use the stats from the survey results to answer those questions. If you just blindly throw in questions, you'll end up getting bogged down with statistics at the end.

For example, you may have a demographic equation asking how many years dermatologists have worked in the field. You can then cross compare that question with all the other questions. In other words, you can figure out how ppl that worked for 10 years or less answered every other question in the questionnaire, and compare that to how the ppl that worked over 50 years answered every other question.

Things can get out of control really quickly. Anyway, I think it would be a cool project depending on your objectives.