Surveys

The following information is excerpted from a PowerPoint presentation on Information Gathering, delivered by OMNI Institute to The Denver Foundation's current Learning Community grantees. To see the entire presentation in PDF, click here.  Other excerpts include interviews and focus groups.

Using Surveys to Gather Information

• Surveys are highly structured questionnaires that are typically designed to gather quantitative information.
  • Close-ended v. open-ended
  • Likert v. yes/no
• They can be administered through the mail, in-person, or by phone.

Benefits and Limitations of Surveys

Benefits

• Helpful in collecting standardized data from a large group of people
• Can be fairly easily summarized with frequencies and means; data can be visually displayed
• Facilitates comparisons between subgroups and , if a good sample, can be generalized to a larger population

Limitations

• Most of the work occurs before you administer to ensure validity and reliability
• Obtaining a high response rate can be very challenging; skipped questions; non-respondents
• There is often limited opportunity to find out about why

Other Challenges to Surveys

• Literacy levels
• May require experts to assist with survey development and higher order analysis
• "Survey fatigue"

Steps Involved in Surveying

• Survey development
  • Gather feedback
  • Pilot
  • Online or paper
• Select/sample and recruit participants
• Determine collection method and plan administration logistics
  • Consent
  • Mail-in or online, in-person or phone
• Administer
• Analyze data

Tips for Effective Survey Development

• When possible, use or adapt existing surveys and scales
• Use primarily close-ended questions
• Limit Yes/No questions
• Ask for information that someone would be willing to share
• Ask only one thing at a time
• Begin with factual, non-controversial questions
• Ask questions in a logical order
• Define difficult terms or abbreviations
• Make the questions as short as possible
• Ensure responses options make sense
• Include clear instructions
• Build in consent process and explain how info will be used
• Pilot the survey

Participant Selection

• Determine your sample
  • Who and how to reach (recruitment strategies)
  • Census (all) or sample
• Strategies
  • Convenience
  • Purposive
  • Random

Tips for Effective Recruitment

• Oversample on desired characteristics
• Advertise the survey and its benefits to the community
  • Work with other community-serving organizations
  • Get influential community leaders on board
  • Target population-specific media outlets and community events
• Advertise incentives
  • Gift cards for something the population can use
• Make participation easy
  • Provide family activities
  • Integrate administration with service delivery
  • Avoid holidays and community celebrations as administration dates

Consideration for an Inclusive Survey Process

• Participation is not linked to services
• Information is confidential and protected
• Establish rapport
• Establish respect for participant expertise and time
• Availability for questions
• Consider translation
• Consider administrator and introductions
• Use community-based sites for administration
• State when results will be available and how they will be shared
• Share information back with the community and any action steps

Tips for Effective Surveying

• Save the Date!
• Identify and train survey administrators
• Convenient time, location, etc.
• Include a self-addressed, stamped envelope
• Provide multiple options for completion
• Follow-up with non-respondents

Survey Analysis

• Averages (or Means): sum of responses for the question/ # of responses for the question
• Percentages (or Frequencies): number of X responses/total # of responses for the question (Multiply by 100)