Survey questions that have multiple response options with an instruction to “select all that apply” are common in our industry, and for good reasons. They are efficient and easy for respondents to answer. They are efficient to lay out graphically. They shorten the length of a survey in terms of both time and space. The…
While it is tempting to use advanced programming to “force” good answers and good behavior out of survey respondents, don’t do it. Let respondents make mistakes. Let them mess up, and then review who messes up. This is one of the best ways to assess data quality in a survey, and trust me you will…
Survey response rates, which are still a measure of data quality and survey success in our industry, continue to drop. Most online surveys of customers (one’s own customers) will garner response rates of two to three percent—and that is if you are lucky and if you do everything right. Rigorously executed phone surveys achieve miserably…
A few weeks we wrote about launching surveys over holidays, and we quoted research noting that there is scant evidence for the widespread assumption that holidays periods should be avoided. Lest you now find yourself working over the Christmas holiday trying to squeeze in the last round of data collection getting input from every last…
So why are we asking them to do our jobs? I ask this question a lot when we execute surveys for marketing and business strategists. They’re smart people who want us to synthesize lots of data into compelling stories for their business clients. They love to assemble data into dashboards, visualizations, and grids. But they…
For some reason, nearly everybody in research believes that holidays are a bad time to ask people if they will participate in research. I am reminded of this because at Versta Research we have some big studies that launched just before Thanksgiving, and we have some big ones coming up just before and during the…
Extremely careful researchers work hard to make sure their surveys reach broad and representative samples of their target populations. This usually involves multiple attempts to reach out via multiple phone calls, e-mails, or letters of request. Since statistical models of inference presume 100% response rates within random samples, the goal is always to get response…
Believe it or not, there are still plenty of phone surveys being done out there, especially for local needs assessments and evaluation surveys. Often these surveys are mandated by state or local governments to ensure that the right services are reaching people who need them. But phone surveys are extremely difficult to field anymore, as…
Surveys run the gamut from silly to serious, and from sloppy to scientific. Occasionally we do something silly if a client insists (though we generally advise against it). But we never do sloppy surveys, and we hope you never do them either. Lean as far as possible towards rigor and science within reasonable constraints of…
There is a “user-friendly” feature that some survey platforms now offer, and almost certainly you should avoid it. It is called auto-advance. I had an unpleasant encounter with it in a customer survey I just took. The idea is that, after clicking on an answer, instead of having to move a mouse or finger all…