Do you think it is ethical to give a survey to clients in a therapeutic environment to gauge their satisfaction with the service? with references

Surveys can be an effective way to gather information for a population of interest by understanding beliefs, attitudes, or tendencies from a select sample (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2017). Though effective, surveys as more susceptible to bias because of their independent nature. When administering a survey for clients regarding their experience at a certain counselling clinic or with an intervention model it is important to keep this bias in mind to structure questions that minimize that chance. Leading questions are one of the most common ways to bias a survey as it increases the chances that a respondent will give a certain answer. It is therefore important to keep questions neutral or interchanging negative and positively framed questions to not sway the answers of the participants.

Picking an appropriate sample is also vital to making sure a survey is valid and reliable. In the above example, it would be important to make sure that the sample is an indicative measure of the population, therefore, making sure of equal representation of genders and possibly ages. To gain information about satisfaction in a counselling session one might choose to use quota sampling, using the sample of the first 50 people that complete the survey (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2017).

Reference:

Goodwin, K. A., & Goodwin, C. J. (2017).Research in psychology: Methods and designs(8th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.