Whether you’re trying to understand your community’s opinion on referendums or how your staff is doing, surveys are a valuable tool for learning about a population on a large scale. When properly planned, you can be much more confident of your results. In this article, we’ll go over the four “C’s” to consider when planning your survey:
Clear
When constructing your survey, the first step is to ensure your participants know what you’re asking them to answer. From the very beginning of your survey, set clear expectations about the topic of your survey, how long it will take to complete, and any other necessary details. As much as possible, condense your survey and individual questions to a single ask, compared to compound or double-barrel questions. If you can have a few outsiders review your survey, they can tell you of any place that may have confused them that you might have missed.
Additionally, make sure that the structure of your survey and questions follow a similar train of thought. Have your questions follow a similar format of word order (e.g., Agree with the following statements vs. disagree with the following statements) and keep similar questions grouped, particularly your close-ended questions such as true or false and multiple choice, and your open-ended questions, which contain your multiple choice.
Concise
If your survey takes on too much at once through its design or questions, it can be a source of confusion. For example, while having a question with seven possible responses of extremely positive, moderately positive, slightly positive, etc., can you condense it down to four, such as very positive, slightly positive, slightly negative, and very negative? Instead of a complex table all in one question, can you condense it into multiple questions to make it easier to read? Whatever you do, look to keep the survey as short as possible, avoid redundant questions, and make sure your participants can feel they are making progress.
Where you can, integrate question logic into your survey. Logic in a survey means that if a participant answers a question in a certain way, they may branch to a different part of the survey or skip a section entirely. This can be helpful if you’re trying to keep retention by asking relevant questions. For example, if a participant has no children, indicate logic so questions revolving what schools their children attend can be skipped. Though it may only skip a question or two, in the end, it can add up to how much time participants are spending on your survey, giving a greater likelihood they will stick with your survey to the end.
Convenient
While it might be obvious to you why everyone should take your survey, it will not be for those who aren’t spending every day thinking about how to make your school or organization successful. As such, you need to communicate why people should take your survey. Personalize the benefit of taking your survey as much as possible by communicating the kind of survey, how the decisions made based on the results will affect them, and how you value their opinion. While completing a survey can be a selfless act, people only have so much time in the day, so convince them why it’s important to take five or ten minutes out of their busy day to answer a few questions.
Convenience will also mean different things to different people. Conducting your survey through digital means should generally be your preferred method, as you can much more efficiently distribute the survey and edit the survey as needed. However, consider your population. Do you have a lot of elderly, or is internet access not as prevalent? Perhaps a mailed survey may work better, where people can fill out their sheet of paper and mail it back to you. If you’re conducting an internal survey and only have one or two questions, a small email or a mobile notification could suffice to get the answers you need. Whatever works best, make sure you put as little of a burden as possible on the survey volunteers.
Clear Conclusions
To have data you can easily interpret might be the most important part of constructing a survey. Even if you’ve constructed the easiest survey to take, if your data means nothing to what you’re trying to accomplish, was it even worth it? As such, once you have determined the goal of your survey, have all your questions related to that goal. Don’t try to tackle too many questions or topics in one survey. Stick to answering your one topic so the only variables you have to sort through are demographics. Keep your survey simple so you can create comparison groups through your data, such as comparing responses between families with kids vs. those who do not or younger vs. older demographics.
Also keep an eye out for bias in your questions. Keep a level of objectivity in your questions and avoid words that might have a positive or negative connotation as much as possible. Also, keep an eye out for your question order, where asking one question might affect another. For example, consider how people might respond to a question about overall thoughts on your district or organization after you asked several questions that made people consider the negative aspects, such as what negative experiences they had in the past few months. People’s emotions can certainly be a factor in any survey, so avoiding emotional responses will help give you an idea of their opinion on any given, ordinary day.
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Know that no matter how much you plan or design your survey, you won’t achieve perfection or have the answers be what you want to hear. However, by implementing the four concepts above, you can work towards knowing how your constituents think and plan the next steps to better serve your community, staff, students, and anyone else.
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