Analysis: Designing Data Gathering Tools

According to the American Statistical Association, a survey is "most often used to describe a method of gathering information from a sample of individuals." It is arguable that traditional methods and means of curating this information, or analytical data, is inadequate to meet respondent standards to date. Technological advancements have evolved in recent years, but the medium content that composes a survey has failed to adhere to the same evolution.

The MarketingProf's article, How to Write an Effective Survey Questionnaire (Part 1), is ambiguous. Much of what was written could apply to many different topics and standards, not just surveys. With the article written in 2006, it provides a basis for dating ideas:

• The respondent should have an 8th-grade education
• Duality in sentence phrasing
• Length of questions – both written and phone surveys

Setting these ideas in 2015 fails to take current technological and educational trends into account. This is due in part to individual attention spans having been reduced considerably due to mainstream communication standards. Microsoft Corp. surveyed 2,000 individuals and concluded, "people now generally lose concentration after eight seconds, highlighting the e ffects of an increasingly digitalized lifestyle on the brain."

A critical aspect not mentioned in part one of MarketingProf's survey article is survey design. In SurveyGizmo's interview Getting Great Survey Data from Panel Respondents – Tips from an Expert, it states, " ... great survey design will help protect your survey data from those who are not as apt to apply themselves." The interview continues to discuss basic survey design techniques that should be applied to ensure max participation and follow-through.

ShiftPlanning provided an article entitled 10 Tips for Creating Better Customer Surveys, in which numerous current survey trends are discussed. Several examples include branding, design, consistency, and offering rewards for completing surveys.

Ensuring a clean and concise survey layout is essential to assure your target audience is aware of who and what the survey represents. According to the ShiftPlanning article's author David Galic, "Not only do you want to brand it accordingly, you want to make it both easy to navigate and a pleasure to look at as well."

The MarketingProf's article provides a reference about ensuring an interview respondent's time is not wasted in the section Knowing what questions should be asked early on in the questionnaire, in the middle, or toward the end. This should tie in directly with ShiftPlanning's suggested branding and navigation suggestions and Lisa Cook's survey design suggestion.

Ensuring survey questions are adequately devised to provide for the best analytical response is important to any study's success. However, survey design – both in the measure of question layout and visual representation – should meet the current technological methods and means of presenting and curating analytical data.