Exploring Organizational Cultures through Virtual Survey Research

Background

Psychologist James Cattell (1860-1944) is one of the pioneers of survey research. Cattell started using mental measures to examine college students and, thus, established psychology as a legitimate science. According to Reinard (2008), the term survey involves “the process of looking at something in its entirety” in order to scrutinize “the complete scope of something” (p. 346). Wrench, Thomas-Maddox, Richmond, and McCroskey (2008) add that a survey is “a social scientific method for gathering quantifiable information about a specific group of people…” (p. 214). However, in social scientific research, the terms survey and questionnaire are often used interchangeable and refer to the use of questions for the purpose of discovering descriptive characteristics about phenomena (Reinard, 2008). More specifically, a questionnaire is “a form containing a series of questions and mental measures that is given to a group of people in an attempt to gain statistical information about the group as part of a survey” (Wrench, et al., 2008, p. 215). This chapter uses the terms survey and questionnaire to refer to the tools used in survey research.