May 15, 2009

Help pretest my survey

A crucial part of my PhD thesis is a survey for movement activists about their usage of communication tools. A crucial part of that is that the survey must be as clear and as short as possible. Here's where I need help: I need a few kind souls to read through the survey (link), and to note any parts that are confusing, contain errors (I am not a native English speaker...), and let me know how long did it take you to complete the survey (I hope that it is doable in ~20 minutes).

You can reach me by commenting here, at my Wikipedia talk page, at Facebook, or at piokon at post dot pl. Thanks,

5 comments:

Gible Fog said...

Page 1: The description "social movement activists" may be offensive to some people/groups you are targetting.

Page 1: typo in "exist this survey" should be "exit this survey"

Q1,4,5,6: Possible issue with respondent's not knowing what some technologies are. Especially may skew Q6 where knowing may give different results.

I have provided IT consultation services to an international religious outreach organisation(the 'local' national part only) including the awareness and use of the technologies listed. In almost every case, the usefulness of a technology is directly related to the ease of learning to use it.

Anonymous said...

"exist this survey?" :-)

i would love to point out more errors for you, but first i need to ask...do i fill out the survey to go through the whole thing, or did you just want the first blurb proofread?

kara

Piotr Konieczny said...

Exist typo corrected :)

Gible Fog: Could you write a little more on how "social movement activist" can be offensive? In my department, this is considered a standard and neutral term.

I considered adding definitions, but it made the survey even bulkier then it is, plus if people don't know what, let's say, a wiki is, they don't need to answer it. But I've readded those definitions to Q6, where it may indeed be helpful.

Thank you for your comments!

Kara: if you can, please, look through the entire survey! Thanks!

Peters J Vecrumba said...

Hello, Piotr!

I went through your survey via Facebook based on my plans for the "Library of Baltic Heritage."

4. I suggest scale of...
1 - core mission
2 - most important
3 - of average importance
4 - least important
5 - not an area of activity for our organization

network neutrality/digital divide need explaining

Other... need more than one, and with grading

Main part of survey (2/5?), too wide for 1024x768 (I think)

In terms of agree/disagree, you're missing "neither agree nor disagree"

4/5 There should be a wiki WHERE (spelling)

Piotr Konieczny said...

Peters, thanks for your comments. Regarding your scale, isn't core mission the most important? Also, to save space (and respondents time in clicking), I am trying to replace "don't care"s with "simply don't click on anything". So if they don't care about a particular area, they are not supposed to click on anything.

If they don't know what nn or dd is, well, it likely means they don't care about it (yet) - the survey is I am afraid to long, so I am trying to avoid making it even longer with definitions/attempts to educate respondents.

Good point about the other.

Yes, the survey is designed for 1200x800; I've added a note on that.

 
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