Surveys tend to fall into two broad categories--questionnaires and interviews. Questionnaires require respondents to fill in forced-choice or open-ended questions either on paper or electronically. Questionnaires can be administered by the individual answering (in what was traditionally called the household drop-off questionnaire and in what today might be an online questionnaire); in some cases, questionnaires are given to groups, and the researcher administers the survey. The advantages of questionnaires are that they tend to be easy to administer and are not expensive; however, they do not result in a lot of high-quality or "rich" data.
The other type of survey is the interview. In the interview, the researcher interviews the respondent in person or by phone and is able to follow up with the respondent by asking additional questions. This type of survey allows the researcher to better understand the respondents' answers and to gather "rich," or descriptive, data. However, interviews can be time-consuming and expensive to conduct, and they may also involve a selection bias because only people who have phones (in some cases), permanent addresses (in some cases), or the time to be interviewed will be subjects.
In addition, surveys can follow respondents over time to see trends; these types of surveys are longitudinal in nature. Other surveys, called cross-sectional, collect information from respondents at one point in time.
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