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Surveys That Work

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A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys

By Caroline Jarrett

Published: July 2021
Paperback: 368 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1933820-53-8
Ebook ISBN: 9781933820835

Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must-have.

Access extra content on Caroline’s website here.

Surveys That Work explains a seven-step process for designing, running, and reporting on a survey that gets accurate results. In a no-nonsense style with plenty of examples about real-world compromises, the book focuses on reducing the errors that make up Total Survey Error—a key concept in survey methodology. If you are conducting a survey, this book is a must-have.

Access extra content on Caroline’s website here.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Steve Krug
Chapter 0: Definitions Chapter: What Is a Survey? And the Survey Octopus
Chapter 1: Goals: Establish Your Goals for the Survey
Chapter 2: Sample: Find People Who Will Answer
Chapter 3: Questions: Write and Test the Questions
Chapter 4: Questionnaire: Build and Test the Questionnaire
Chapter 5: Fieldwork: Get People to Respond
Chapter 6: Responses: Turn Data into Answers
Chapter 7: Reports: Show the Results to Decision-Makers
Chapter 8: The Least You Can Do

FAQ

These common questions and their short answers are taken from Caroline Jarrett’s book Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing Better Surveys. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.

  1. I see so many bad surveys—isn’t the best survey the one that’s not done at all?
    Unfortunately, we are all bombarded with bad surveys. For example, someone in an organization decides that constantly blasting out questionnaires to every customer is a great way to get feedback. Their response rate is terrible, but they don’t consider that this poor response will simply create lots of errors—and annoyed customers. And since these bad questionnaires go to everyone, you’ve got a very good chance of seeing too many questionnaires—and many of them will be rotten ones. A bad survey gets you bad data. A bad application of any method gets you bad data.

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Sample Chapter

This is a sample chapter from Caroline Jarrett‘s book Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys. 2021, Rosenfeld Media.

Chapter 1: Goals: Establish Your Goals for the Survey

In this chapter, you’re going to think about the reason why you’re doing the survey (Figure 1.1).

By the end of the chapter, you’ll have turned the list of possible questions into a smaller set of questions that you need answers to.

Write down all your questions

I’m going to talk about two sorts of questions for a moment:

  • Research questions
  • Questions that you put into the questionnaire

Research questions are the topics that you want to find out about. At this stage, they may be very precise (“What is the resident
population of the U.S. on 1st April in the years of the U.S. Decennial Census?”) or very vague (“What can we find out about people who purchase yogurt?”).

Questions that go into the questionnaire are different; they are the ones that you’ll write when you get to Chapter 3, “Questions.”

Now that I’ve said that—don’t worry about it. At this point, you ought to have neatly defined research questions, but my experience is that I usually have a mush of draft questions, topic titles, and ideas (good and bad).

Write down all the questions. Variety is good. Duplicates are OK.

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