Urban Green Areas – their functions under a changing lifestyle of ...

Figure 1.10: Forms of surveys Source: STEINGRUBE 2011
Other way is interview. Here the interviewers are trained, the more effective and more
reliable are interviews, the more hornest the answers and the responses tend to be given. On
the other hand interviews have to be very short – thus you cannot ask as many questions as
with a written survey.
Interviews can be conducted face-to-face, which is still the most effective and reliable
survey method.
Since many years professional call center conduct interviews by phone (cati = computer
assisted telephone interview). This method is faster and cheaper than face-to-face
interviews, but you are not sure who is really responding. Interviews by telephone are
meanwhile the most commonly used survey instrument. Since a few years there is a new
technique: so-called online-interviews (see for more details below chapter 1.5.4.1).
It is not possible to adjust all desired information into the questions of a standardized
questionnaire, those surveys are generally conducted as partly standardized or unstructured
interviews.
Guided interviews use written guidelines. These normally comprise only open questions to
ensure that all desired topics are covered.
The study used primarily standardized surveys: Many oral interviews face-to-face and an
attempt with online-survey were also conducted. Informational interviews at the beginning
and expert discussion completed the empirical information collection. These methods will
be discussed here more in detail.
1.4.4.1 Online survey
The online survey or web-based survey is a new kind of standardized survey. Based on the
rapid development of social media and technology, online surveys are an innovative
method because of their speed and number of responses. It can be used in a variety of
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