Step 1: What do you want to learn?
Whenever you decide to make a survey, you’re always interested in learning what a group of people thinks about a certain topic. However, it’s extremely important to make sure you realize specifically what it is that you are interested in. It can be really easy to think that you know what you’re looking for, but then after making your questions, realize that they need to be changed so you can actually gather the important information you want. By making it clear to yourself initially what you want to gather from your survey, you can eliminate the need to dramatically change your survey questions.
Step 2: How are you going to ask your questions?
This isn’t to say that your first draft of questions will be left unchanged for your final survey. You absolutely need to make sure you are being clear. This is probably the most important step of making a good survey and one that I struggled with when making mine. It’s really easy to think your question is easily understood even though it isn’t. For example, when writing my survey about diversity in colleges, I initially asked:
“How much did the diversity of the student body affect your decision of where to go to college?”
This isn’t a very good question. First of, there is not good way to measure the results, so once I realized this, I decided to put the question on a scale of 1-5. This way I can at least have a good way to measure the results and keep them somewhat relative. Also, I didn’t qualify “diversity” enough. Since I want to learn about how racial diversity impacted students’ decisions of where to go to school, I needed to add “racial” into the question to make it clear that I was asking about racial diversity and not gender or sexual diversity. After making these changes, my final question ended up being:
“On a scale of 1-5, how much do you value racial diversity in a college student body?”
Step 3: Where are you distributing it?
Lastly, you need to find a place to distribute your survey. You need to ask yourself what the right audience is for your survey and then figure out a good place to reach that group of people. For me, my audience are college and high school students. A good way to reach a young audience like that is through social media. I will use Facebook to send my survey to my college and high school friends who hopefully will help me by completing the survey.