So you’re going to Conduct a Survey, ei?

There is such a term linked to survey – Design. Or Research. We all are aware of the complex and oftentimes tedious reality of investigating, experimenting and analyzing certain studies. What else should we expect in doing surveys? It is, anyway, a part of the entire research process.

Here are some basic steps in doing Survey Research.

1. Determine what you want to examine. Why are you performing a survey in the first place? What would people think regarding some product you are going to launch? Are your customers satisfied with the services you are offering? Have, first, a specific issue you would want to solve.
2. Define the population to be studied. Okay, so you’ve got your problem identified. Now you need to establish who you want to address. Are you sure you are asking the right crowd? If they could not relate to any of the topics you are throwing, you’re shooting the wrong board. To illustrate: you do not inquire first time visitors of your site if they enjoy discounts offered only to members.
3. Time to write the survey. Write and revise and revise until you perfect it.
4. Select a sample. In step 2, you have just identified who you want to study. You’d exhaust time and a lot of effort before you finish if, say, you have a hundred thousand subjects to survey. You cannot simply decide “Oh I only want to survey a hundred of them.” You need to compute for the sufficient sample size so reliability will not be a problem in your outcomes.
5. Oversee the survey. There is nothing wrong in checking the results once in a while. At least you will have a sight on how your survey is doing, if your response rate is low, etc.
6. Last is the fun and messy part – analyzing and interpreting the results. Nothing could be more rewarding than completing the puzzle – having explanations and conclusions to your thesis.

An interesting find in doing surveys – there is always additional information which you can derive from your data. For instance, you can find correlations among variables when doing cross tabs, or you would be surprised to see a totally different point of view in open-ended questions, etc.