Surveys are a great way to obtain data on various different statistics and their relationships with one another. Directly asking a selected group of people questions on a subject and seeing the patterns in their responses is a very useful tool to have in research. This is the main reason why surveys are used so often in scientific research. These surveys are useful in various different social sciences, but in the case of criminology it is just as useful, despite the fact that it deals with crime. The usefulness of surveys in criminology is due to three main reasons, a large set of data, the ability to show how different factors affect each other, and the ability to obtain data that otherwise would not be easily available.

First, surveys are useful to criminology through their large sets of data. Surveys are really easy to give to a large number of people, which increases the amount of data received. This allows the researcher to get a rather large sample size in their research, better showing the relationship between the variables the researcher is trying to connect. When researching a topic, having a large sample size is always a great boon to prove the validity of the study, so the ability of surveys to reach a large range of people is very important. This is a strength of surveys to all fields, and criminology is no exception.

Secondly, surveys are great at showing the existence of relationships between multiple variables. A survey is made up of a set of questions that the person taking the survey is expected to answer truthfully. These questions are based around the variables that the researcher is attempting to correlate with each other to show the variables relationships. An example of this would be questions on levels of self control with questions that ask if a person has committed online piracy. This survey would show if self control will have any effect on the rates of online piracy. This ability to show correlation between multiple  variables makes surveys very powerful tools in data collection.

Lastly, surveys allow for the collection of certain data that would otherwise be very hard or even impossible to obtain. This is especially important when talking about crimes, as most people would not admit to crimes they have committed under normal circumstances. This is fixed by surveys because they are anonymous, so more people would be comfortable to admit to doing crimes. This is very important because it gives us insight into statistics like how common certain crimes like cyber theft and piracy really are among a group of people, making surveys invaluable to criminological study.

In conclusion, surveys are extremely useful for the field of criminology due to the large amount of data that can be collected, the ability to show relationships between different variables, and to collect data that would otherwise be impossible to collect. The popularity of surveys is mostly due to these three factors, as they are some of the most important reasons that surveys are such a powerful tool for research. The use of surveys is a common way to collect data from a designated group of people, making them more mainstream to the populace, which could make even more people participate in them . Surveys are typically used in a majority of human studies and they will continue to be used in the future.