| Abstract |
When questionnaire remains to be one of the most predominant tools used in social sciences studies, researchers can always get frustrated by the low response rate that they may receive in a survey. Having insufficient responses would inevitably limit the usage of more complex (and more scientific) statistical data analysis techniques and so affect the quality of the findings. In this case, all resources and efforts put into the study could be wasted, and the researchers may not get the intended outcomes. These historical challenges will become even worse when researchers try to carry out surveys involving local citizens in extremely busy cities, i.e. people passing you on the street are always in a rush and don't even bother to stop for a second to hear your pitch. This paper reports on the survey experience that the researchers gained in a recent smart city study. Two questionnaire surveys were conducted in the study, namely a street-intercept survey focused on smart parking and an in-home survey focused on smart meters. This paper describes and discusses the data collection challenges that the researchers experienced in this smart city study, together with tactic strategies adopted to increase the response rates. This paper will be of interest and importance to researchers who need to do surveys in all kinds of public information and research fields, such as smart city research, urban planning, marketing studies, psychology, public health and governance, and sociology. |