As more and more people use smartphones and mobile devices to fill out surveys, basic survey design decisions need to be revisited again and again. How should surveys be laid out visually? How should answer scales be constructed? How should people be recruited to take surveys? Some of the latest answers to these questions come…
By which we really mean How to Label Your 11-Point Scale because you shouldn’t be using 10-point scales. Plenty of research shows that numeric scales going from 1 to 10 (ten points) are less effective than numeric scales going from 0 to 10 (eleven points). A recently published article in Survey Practice adds more evidence…
Survey invitations are like elevator pitches. You’ve got 30 seconds (or fewer) to grab attention and convince a reader that it’s worth investing time to take your survey. Survey response rates are declining, but there are easy ways to cut through the clutter and boost your own. Here is a before-and-after example of a survey…
Just last week a client proposed having their salespeople recruit customers to take the loyalty and satisfaction survey we had launched for them. It’s a terrible idea, for exactly the reasons that Dagwood realizes with his baffled look in this cartoon. If you want honest feedback that your business unit can honestly use to improve,…
Question order in surveys matters a lot more than most of us realize, which makes it critical to assess what you most want to know before your survey respondents are influenced (or, in the language or survey experts, “primed”) by additional questions on the topic. Here is a superb example from last fall’s political polling…
Progress bars that show respondents how far along they are in a survey have become standard in our industry. But are progress bars a documented “best practice” for survey research, or just another convention? A recent article in the Social Science Computer Review offers a meta-analysis of 32 field experiments designed to see whether progress…
It might seem that turning data into stories happens entirely at the back end of research when data are analyzed and insights are synthesized into reports. Not so. It requires careful thought at every step from the very beginning (during design) to the very end (during fact-checking). The entire data collection process is no exception. …
The next time you field an online survey, take a look at the metadata, which will tell you the operating systems respondents are using and the devices on which they are completing the survey. You may be surprised. In our most recent general population survey, which included adults in a two-county region of a “non-tech”…
Every once in a while we opt for slider scales on surveys we have designed – usually when we want a numeric rating from 0 to 10. It seems easier for respondents than shifting over to the number pad, and it offers a more fun, interactive experience than simply clicking radio buttons. Sliders also allow…
If you have ever been called to participate in a phone survey, you probably know the routine where you hear a question and then jump in with an answer. A good interviewer will remind you that she needs to read the entire question and all the answer options just to be sure that you offered…