A Survey

Transcription

The principal goal of surveys is to inform and simplify the world around us by giving us key pieces of information. Somewhat ironically, that goal of simplification involves many complicated steps. Join me and we’ll walk through 10 steps in conducting surveys. Keep in mind that these steps are broad brush strokes. They are easy to describe, but often hard to execute. Step 1 – Know Your Population In their most basic form, surveys are a tool to represent a broader group. You have to decide that group and your reason for studying them early on. Are you interested in an entire country, a region or a rare population of certain individuals? Step 2 - Determine a Mode Will your survey be face-to-face, online, mail, or telephone? No survey mode is perfect for all scenarios. You have to choose the mode carefully in light of your needs and resources. Step 3 – Create a Questionnaire Surveys need questions. No brainer, huh? In practice, writing good questions requires painstaking consideration. Step 4 – Test Your Questionnaire So you think you wrote awesome questions, huh?, Well, when I sing in the shower, I think I could tour with Conway Twitty. ALL survey question should be pretested- either by focus groups, cognitive interviewing, split-ballot experiments, field pre-testing or some other method. Step 5 - Get a Good Sample Sampling is the magic of surveys. Your sample consists of the people you are trying to interview. A great questionnaire will yield a junk survey with a bad sample. Step 6 – Collect the Data This is where we find more tricky bits. Collecting data ultimately involves making phone calls, knocking on doors, posting HTML, or mailing paper. Data collection must be rigorous, documented, and consistent. Step 7- Organize and “Clean” the Data Suppose you did a telephone survey with a CATI system. You just got a dataset that looks like a messy spreadsheet with questions in strange orders scattered across multiple columns. You also probably have many pieces of information that need to be rescaled and renumbered, precisely and accurately. This is also a good time to calculate response rates- a quality measure consisting of the number of completed interviews divided by the valid sample. Step 8 – Weight the Data Now, even if you did everything perfectly up to this step, your final sample of respondents probably won’t perfectly match the population. Post-stratification weighting will now help you to correct many known imbalances. Step 9 – Analyze the Data Ain’t nobody got time for that fancy spreadsheet. Survey analysis is fascinating, addictive and extremely useful. You’ll want to present question order, wording, and basic descriptive statistics by creating a “topline” report. Then you might want to explore subpopulations with cross-tabs. You might even poke at causal relationships using regression. Graphics are cool, too. Step 10 – Present the Results If you conducted a good survey, you just spent a lot of money to share valuable information with important people. You now need to communicate your results to your audience in a way that is accessible and interesting. Finally, give someone a high five because you’ve just gone through the process of a survey. Now, let’s do a quick review of those 10 steps. Step 1 – Know Your Population Step 2 - Determine a Mode Step 3 – Create a Questionnaire Step 4 – Test Your Questionnaire Step 5 - Get a Good Sample Step 6 – Collect the Data Step 7- Organize and “Clean” the Data Step 8 – Weight the Data Step 9 – Analyze the Data Step 10 – Present the Results Ten Steps: Survey... Excellence.