Surveys: Getting the Reluctant to Do the Irrelevant for the (Mostly) Uninterested

1. Surveys: Getting the Reluctant to Do the Irrelevant for the (Mostly) Uninterested Patrick Beard Coordinator, Academic Reviews and Planning Brock University

2. But First, A Word from our Sponsor:

4. AGENDA • Maximizing Participation • (Getting the Reluctant motivated) • Dealing With the Issue of Relevance • (Why is this Survey Important?) • Making Results Meaningful • (Why a “Data Dump” is Not Enough)

5. Maximizing Participation

6. Maximizing Participation

7. Maximizing Participation

8. Maximizing Participation Look for “secret weapons:” Mathematics Academic Review Survey: 50.7% (vs. 41.3% overall) Pina McDonnell Administrative Assistant Department of Mathematics

9. Relevance How do we make the survey relevant? by Making it important.

10. Relevance “A survey is a transaction. To get students’ attention, administrators must entice them.” Sara Lipka, Want Data? Ask Students. Again and Again.

11. Relevance IBM's e-business Innovation Centre in Toronto ran an online business-to-business survey between 2000 and 2001, and after tweaking a number of variables they managed to double their response rates in the second year of running the survey. Here are some of the lessons they learnt: - Survey length - Be honest about how long the survey will really take - Provide value, value, value - In our experience, online survey response rates increase dramatically when the participant gains value from responding. - Send the survey mid-week, during mid-afternoon - Use 1 reminder e-mail to the survey invitation - Allow for some open ended questions http://www.peoplepulse.com.au/Survey-Response-Rates.htm

12. Relevance Hot Tip: Make it Matter Communicate the relevance and value of your survey to your participants. In your invitation, let participants know what the survey’s purpose is, how the results will benefit them, and how much their opinions matter! Jessica Foster on Maximizing Survey Response Rates (http://aea365.org/blog/?p=3302)

13. Interpreting Results • Dangers of the “Data Dump” • Interpretation helps comprehension • Interpretation helps address issues • Interpretation takes time and effort

14. Interpreting Results

15. Interpreting Results

16. Interpreting Results You can lead a horse to water…. Philosophy Self Study (Version 1.0): c) Working with other people. Generally speaking, working with other people is not something which is encouraged by Departments within the Humanities; working independently is. Students, for example, are warned not to write their essays as members of a committee but to write them independently. And joint projects in which two or more students work together and the group as a whole receiving a single grade is not a strategy found within the Department of Philosophy.

17. Interpreting Results Don’t allow the numbers to speak for themselves. Numeric results and statistical comparisons are more accessible when accompanied by an explanation and interpretation of what can and cannot be concluded from them. Using NSSE Data http://www.nsse.iub.edu/2011_Institutional_Report/pdf/Using_NSSE_Data.pdf

18. And remember…. If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all the evidence that you tried.

19. and… If you can’t convince them, confuse them.

20. Questions/Discussion?