A common way to collect information about a population is to conduct a survey. That is, a researcher asks questions of a randomly selected sample from the population. Conducting a survey raises problems that can be surprisingly tricky to resolve. Consider how we phrase our questions. Is there bias in the phrasing that might lead participants to answer the questions in a certain way? Are any questions worded ambiguously? If some of the people in the sample interpret a question one way, and others interpret it differently, the survey’s results will be meaningless.