In our most recent class, we started learning about and crafting sample survey questions that we could use to gather information for our next assignments. In high school, I had to make my fair share of surveys. I made surveys for clubs, surveys for psychology classes, I even made a few surveys just for fun. Personally, I like them. But are they really helping?
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Do surveys really give us all that much information? For psychology and behavioral sciences classes, I could possibly see the benefit of a survey. But with the amount of information that the writer needs, the survey would have to be over fifteen questions long. Very few people have the desire, let alone patience, to sit down and fill out over fifteen questions of a subject that they don’t really care all that much about.
What Next?
Is there another option? To be completely honest. I think this is the best that it’s going to get. Surveys have the potential to be great tools of research, we just to need to find incentives.
In my experience, promising food for filling out a survey is one great option to get people to respond. It worked wonders in high school; if it was so successful then, it must be even more successful in college, where free food is a gift from the gods.
Another option would be to find a topic that people care a lot about. At least once a month, the student body will get an email from Ruff Riders or another school organization, looking for opinions on things happening around campus. Most surveys that have to do with sports or even campus food have a good turnout. Things that could use improvement especially have an influx of opinions.
So I think the partial answer to my supposed hypothesis is this: find something that your audience cares about and that also needs improvement and get to questioning.
Source: Giphy