How many of you have taken a survey before? Yeah me too. Sometimes they come in annoying emails, sometimes their after you use a service and offer to enter you into some kind of contest after you submit your contact email. For me it usually results in them spamming my with endless phone calls. The point I’m trying to get at, is that surveys may be great for feedback, but as someone who takes surveys, they’re not my favorite thing.

Me every time someone asks me to take a survey

For the next step in our class research learning, we were all assigned to compose and conduct surveys. When my professor told us the assignment, I thought to myself, piece of cake, how hard can a survey be. But it turns out, surveys actually require a lot of thought because every question and answer counts.

Same Rae same

I made my survey about the dining services at our campus, what works, what doesn’t. I had to break it down and ask if people had a meal plan, provide options, ask if they liked it and used a scale to show how much. Thanks to google forms, the sharing of this survey was easy to complete, but what was interesting was how strategic I had to be in my questions and answer options. So here are a few tips from your very own first time survey maker: Little Kelli

My very own Google Form

1. Write clear, concise questions and answers for your survey. I CANNOT STAND when surveys have unnecessarily long questions and answers. *ironic because I’m a wordy writer* If its a survey, its optional, and should be easy to follow. Because the attention span of most people is short, it is important to get right to the point.
2. Do not add short answer boxes to the answer of every question. I am sorry, but most people do not want to take the time to write out their entire opinion for every question. It is exhausting, and variation will help your survey taker feel the survey is going by faster if there are questions with a variety of answer formats.
3. Maximize your questions. No one wants to fill out a survey with pages of questions, but it is also hard to feel as if the survey is meaningful if it only has two yes or no questions. I would say shoot for a variety of types of questions, and try not to make your survey longer than it needs to be. If it is going to take more than 5 minutes, let your audience know so you have a higher chance of people answering honestly, instead of rushing to finish.
4. Understand your survey will not be perfect. I spent a lot of time trying to make the wording of my questions very precise, but it turns out there were so many other questions I did not even think to ask until after my survey was completed, that it would not have mattered in the end. So write down the questions you have now, don’t worry about what you find after, and roll with what you’ve got.

I am currently waiting for the results of my survey to roll in, for it is still being filled out by the specific demographic I targeted, but am excited to see what my results will be. This if the first time I feel the research I am doing is my own because I am creating the questions and finding the data myself instead of looking for the answers in someone else’s database. It was fun to be one the other side of the survey for once. More details to come in new week’s episode and if you get the chance to make a survey, try it out, so far I’ve had a blast.

♥ Little Kelli