‘Our survey said…’ 8 May, 2006
After years of wondering who on earth they get to participate in those polls reported in the media, the other night I found out. People like me. As someone who’s designed, delivered and interpreted plenty of questionnaires it was interesting to see how an international company like Mori does it.
There were quite a few questions (the session lasted around half an hour), many accompanied by response cards with the various options available for each question. And to add that twenty-first-century touch to the experience, all my answers were noted down in a custom bit of software on a small Tablet PC.
A lot of it was standard fare: ‘What do you think of the following statements?’, ‘Have you ever done x before?’, but I thought some of the questions were definitely suspect. For example, from memory: ‘What do you think are the main things people look for when choosing a school for their child?’. Note that it wasn’t ‘What are the main things you look for when choosing a school for your child?’. It’s a subtle, but important difference. The first version is designed to elicit a specific set of responses drawn from ‘popular’ influences. Think Daily Mail headlines, school league tables etc. It’s a question looking to reinforce known answers and it’s bad practice.
So, even though it’s people like me participating in these surveys, poor question design means our answers aren’t always what we want them to be.
May 9th, 2006 at 1:09 am
Interesting use of Live Journal. I don’t really know any folks that use it.
Regarding your posting, now I see why you took interest in my WebWord comments about surveys.
That’s all for now…
- John
May 9th, 2006 at 9:14 am
> … now I see why you took interest in my WebWord comments about surveys
Yes. The Mori visit really got me thinking about surveys, and since then there have been a few things that have caught my eye. I suppose you could say it’s given me a ‘focus’ and at the moment I’m seeing everything through that lens.
> Interesting use of Live Journal. I don’t really know any folks that use it.
He he. Now you do! One thing you need to know about me, John, is that I’m tight. When I was looking at setting up a blog a few years ago, I didn’t want to have to pay for a domain name, hosting, traffic (ha!) and so on. LiveJournal was the only hosted service that I could find at the time, so I went for it. I’m currently trying to get my head around the wacky templating language so that I can include some of the newer features, but it’s worked out really well for what I want to do so far.