Question

4. You desire to do a survey of likely voters in Michigan to determine whether they would support a tax increase to subsidize the building of a new General Motors facility in the state. A) Formulate 3 pertinent questions that would be useful to ask in this survey, along with possible answer choices for your respondents (don’t ask for demographics only…no questions on gender, age, etc.). Why would you ask these questions? B) To whom would you distribute your survey? Why would this be an appropriate sample group? What sample size would you recommend and why? C) What kind of literature base would you use to underlie your statistical information? (Cite three examples of relevant scholarly literature.)

Answer 1

A)

• Do you believe that raising taxes is a fair way of financing public projects? Yes/No

• Do you believe that a new General Motors facility would bring benefits to the state? Yes/No

• How much do you agree with the idea of implementing a new tax in order to finance this facility? Totally agree/Agree/Somewhat agree/Somewhat Disagree/Disagree/Totally Disagree

I would ask these questions because they address the elements that I find important. They would allow me to examine the respondents' view of taxes, General Motors, and the use of taxes to finance private companies.

B)

I would distribute this survey to the working people of Michigan, as they are the ones most likely to care about changes in taxation. I would try to distribute this survey to 1% of the population of the state. This is because such a number of people would give me enough results to obtain results that are statistically significant. However, it is still a small enough number, so I can manage the data easily.

C)

I would first look at an example of an opinion survey conducted in the state of Michigan. I would also look at a survey that discusses the subject of raising state taxes. Finally, I would look at an academic source that explains how to create effective survey questions.