Surveys

A survey describes a method of gathering information from a number of individuals (a sample) to learn something about the larger population from which the sample has been drawn. Surveys have a variety of purposes, such as determining what college degrees technical communicators hold.

Surveys can be conducted to gather information through a printed questionnaire, over the telephone, by mail, in person, through e-mail, or on the Web. This information is collected through use of standardized procedures so that every participant is asked the same questions in the same way.

Features

Conducting a Web survey is the most cost-effective method, whether you are writing an article about the types of publishing tools technical communicators use at work or you want to know how much money a typical technical communicator earns in North America. Many sites, such as SurveyMonkey and ZapSurvey, allow a user to sign up for a free account and design a survey quickly. Using a survey Web site, the user selects the types of questions from drop-down menus and fills in the questions to be posed to respondents. A free account limits the number of responses per survey (for example, SurveyMonkey has a limit of 100 responses per survey). To create an unlimited number of surveys, receive an unlimited number of responses, and have access to all reporting features, users are asked to pay a monthly fee of at least $20 USD.

Some of the features many Web surveys have include the following:

  • Select the type of questions you want to pose, including multiple choice, open-ended text, and rating scales
  • Use survey templates to help with designing the survey questionnaire
  • Provide a survey in a number of languages, such as Chinese and Arabic
  • Use custom themes that allow the user to change the color, style, or size of any element in the survey
  • View responses in real-time that are represented in graph and chart form
  • Save results in a report and share them with others
  • Manage a list of contacts (e-mail addresses) to track who has responded to a survey or to send out a survey invitation

Types of questions on a survey

Different types of questions can be used to collect information. The most common types of questions are structured (fixed) response and non-structured (open-ended) response.

Structured (fixed response) questions offer the respondent a closed set of responses from which to choose. Structured questions make data collection and analysis much simpler, and they take less time to answer.

An example of a structured question is as follows:

Are you an STC member?
() Yes
() No

Non-structured (open-ended) questions are those that do not have a list of answer choices from which to choose. Respondents are simply asked to write their response to a question.

An example of an open-ended question is as follows:

What do you like best about the Master of Science program in Technical Communication Management at Mercer University?

Benefits

Including a survey on your Web site or sending out an e-mail invitation to invite a targeted group to participate in a survey will help you obtain information you want from respondents. By conducting your survey online using a tool such as SurveyMonkey or ZapSurvey, you can quickly see all responses to your question and analyze the data instantly, without compiling the data from scratch. The responses you get will be much faster using the Web than sending your questionnaires out by regular mail and then waiting for respondents to send their answers back to you.

Using a survey-creation Web site will allow you to generate questions quickly, customize the look of your surveys, import a list of contacts from your e-mail program and invite them to participate, and have the survey results automatically represented in chart or report form. You will save time and you can quickly make changes to your content based on these results.

Web designers would benefit from using a survey tool. For example, Eric Hernadez may be redesigning an STC SIG Web site and wants feedback on the work he has done so far. He decides to create a survey, asking SIG members to find out what features they like or dislike. He decides to use ZapSurvey, as he remembers his high school technology teacher mentioning the site to help him create surveys directed at Web site users. Eric wants to send out an invitation to his chosen set of SIG members and analyze the results as they come in. Based on the feedback received, he makes changes to those features respondents were not particularly fond of.

Eric can also feature a short poll on a specific Web site page. He can ask the question, “Is this information useful to you?” Based on the feedback Eric gets, he can make a decision to either keep the page and continue to update it, or remove the page completely.

Alicia Madison wants to know whether technical communication has the potential of being a viable undergraduate program at Dixie College. To determine whether the demand is there, she attends a couple of local STC chapter meetings and talks to one member who has a team of 15 technical communicators. She asks him if she can have his team fill out an online survey to find out whether they have undergraduate degrees in technical communication and determine whether their degrees played a significant role in being hired with the company.

External Web Sites

Credits

Mary Tan.

Providing technical communication > Collaboration > Working in teams > Technologies enabling team communication > Web 2.0