Four Basic Tips to a Strong Survey

Surveys are unique in that they can be incredibly simple or complex. They can be done with ten people in one population or ten thousand in twenty. Although there are some universal tips that can help any survey produce better data. These are four small changes and things to note to make any survey better.

The first tip is planning out a survey for your company. It can be easy to develop some questions and get right into it, but problems will arise. If a survey creator knows what to ask, how, when, where, and has backups, things will go smoothly. Planning the survey also helps with pivots if anything falls through at any point.

The second tip is creating an outline of questions. Questions are at the heart of any survey, and should be examined closely. They should be fair, direct, clear, and honest to the participant. It’s very easy to lead an answer, conflate questions, or to have poor wording. People will answer the questions, just make sure they’re good.

The third tip is to test the survey. Depending on the scale of the survey this will be more or less necessary. A survey which has only a few very simple questions could just have a few lookovers, for example. Although an intensive and full length survey can always benefit from a proper test in the desired population.

Finally, summarize the information properly. After conducting a survey make sure people understand its results. If there is any hope for a survey doing anything useful, it must be displayed properly. Depending on the context this means graphs, tables, unique formatting, whatever. The important part is that whatever the survey shows is clear and easy to understand. 

After all this is done, the survey produced is one that is useful, clear, and honest. There’s a lot of doubt about subjective surveys nowadays, some of which are entirely fair. Make sure not to contribute to them.