Surveys: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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If I ask you to help with my survey, what happens?

You get...

  • us holding your hand every step of the way
  • advice in plain English, not survey jargon
  • use of a business reply address, so replies are post free but you pay only for those returned
  • regular updates on the number of responses so far
  • your results in your choice of our standard formats no later than two weeks after you decide to close the survey to further responses. That's guaranteed, or there's no charge for the whole project. 
  • a single point of contact, and
  • informants get an independent destination to send replies to, assuring their confidentiality

You choose...

How much does it cost to run a survey? 

It depends where you are starting. If you already have an instrument (questionnaire), then the cost of actually running the survey and getting some reports showing results depends on the scale of the exercise. Our QUISH package is designed to meet this need. There are some fee examples here. Estimates of the fees for other services you might need are shown on our fees page. You may also find it helpful to review some case studies. 

If you haven't got an instrument, you may choose to instruct us to develop one. The cost. varies according to the size and complexity of the task. We have a case study of a project including the development of an instrument.

If you would like a free, no-commitment estimate for your specific project, please contact us. A phone call is usually all it takes to allow us to give a good idea of how we might help, and what our fees might be. We'll usually send an outline proposal as a .pdf file attached to an email.

How long will it take to develop an instrument? 

If you are in a hurry, we can usually meet your management team within a week of being instructed, or as soon as you can set up the meeting. It might take a couple of weeks to set up some focus group meetings with potential informants. So allowing us a week or so after that, we could present a draft list of items three weeks after you instruct us. 

After a meeting to discuss the draft, within another week we can show you a draft instrument with the items changed to take account of the outcome of our meeting, sequenced appropriately and laid out in an attractive, inviting way which makes it obvious what we want people to do. Allowing another week for your comments and for us to make amendments, and another week for printing, we could be ready to distribute questionnaires six weeks after you brief us. 

How long will it take to run a survey? 

From the day the informants receive the questionnaires, you should usually ask them to complete and return them no more than one week later. If you allow more time than this, people tend to put the questionnaire on one side, thinking they'll complete it later. Then a lot of them forget. 

It is worth waiting another week after the published closing date for the stragglers to trickle in. This gives us two weeks to capture the data before we actually close the survey. As long as you have chosen one of our standard reporting styles (most clients do) and the responses are coming back to us directly (not to you to be forwarded in a big parcel) you will have your results no more than two weeks* after we close the data capture - which could be just four weeks after the questionnaires were distributed. 

*That's guaranteed, or there's no charge for the whole project.

We usually improve on this by a substantial margin, often dispatching your results within 24 hours of closing the survey.This is quick service by anyone's standards and is one of the reasons why clients choose QUANTIFY

What response rate should I expect? 

Employee survey 

You can get very nearly 100% response if you are willing and able to get people together in groups to complete the survey there and then. If you can't do this, or choose not to, you can still get response rate in an employee survey better than 80%, but this depends on a whole range of conditions being satisfied. Of crucial importance are people's existing attitudes in general and to the organisation in particular. There are a number of techniques for response enhancement we can help you with. 

Customer survey 

Your customers probably have less commitment to your organisation than your employees, so probably the response rate will be smaller than for an employee survey. The range of possible response rates is very wide. Among customers who choose casually to use your service you might be lucky to get 5% response. If you offer a service which clients are committed to for some time having chosen you, you will probably get better response and a good rate might be between 50% and 70%. Our management of the survey, and the response enhancement techniques we can advise you on can still make a tremendous difference. 

What will the outputs from the survey look like?

Naturally, it depends on the nature of the survey and the best way to present the results. And on your preference, and your budget.

We send you progress reports while the survey is still open, and a collection of reports after it closes. The Outputs page gives examples, and provides a download link to a comprehensive set of illustrations where you can choose the styles that suit you best..

How often should I repeat the survey? 

Each time you repeat the survey, you can compare the results this time with results last time, and any times before that. If you have reacted to previous survey results by introducing initiatives to bring about improvements, you should see an improving trend in the results. But bear in mind that by taking an interest, you increase expectations so good results get harder to achieve. 

You need to leave enough time between surveys for your initiatives to have effect. You also need to be sure that one set of results is comparable with another. This means you need to do the survey under the same conditions each time. All kinds of things can influence the results and you should try to do the survey each time under similar conditions:

Employee survey
Customer survey
annual pay review pricing changes
holidays seasonal fluctuations in demand / delivery pressures
restructuring competitor activity
   
Some organisations do them annually. Others make it every two years, to avoid survey fatigue setting in. Others do annual surveys, but take a holiday now and again by missing out one year's survey. Another popular approach is a detailed annual census survey with quarterly "tracking" surveys using just a sample.  The best frequency depends on the product or service and the number of clients involved. If you have very many clients, a rolling sampled programme may be best. With smaller numbers, you may choose an annual survey.

Should I run a census or use sampling? 

The main reasons to use sampling are to cut the amount of work involved, and the cost of the exercise. But if you plan to subdivide the responses into subsets you need to be sure that there will be enough responses in each subset to give you significant data. We can advise on this.

One disadvantage of sampling is the danger that people who know the survey is running, but who were not chosen for inclusion in the sample get the message that their views are not wanted. You can overcome this by getting everyone to complete the questionnaire, but only analysing a sample drawn from them, though this naturally cuts the saving you achieve.

Should I offer a "neutral" or no opinion option in a response frame?

If your instrument takes the form of a list of statements for informants to agree or disagree with, we might come up with a response frame something like

  Strongly disagree Disagree In between Agree Strongly agree
I am proud to work here

Should we include that central sitting on the fence box? The evidence is that providing it or not providing it doesn't make much difference. The distribution of the answers which do express an opinion remains much the same whether it is there or not.

The case for leaving it out is that some people will tick the Neither agree nor disagree box who might otherwise have ticked Agree or Disagree. But if you leave it out, some people will find it impossible to choose between Agree and Disagree and may be put off completing the questionnaire, or may tick two boxes, which we can't treat as a useful response.. 

The decision to include or exclude the middle option is a matter of judgement and should depend on 

  • the nature of the research
  • the nature of the questions - whether informants will have views about the issues
  • the nature of the target audience - how difficult / unsettling informants will find the chosen response frame

Having decided on an approach, it is best to stick to it right through the questionnaire rather than repeatedly ask informants to take on board a different response frame.

How many options should I offer on an agreement scale?

Anywhere between 4 and 7 options meets the two rules of thumb - you need 

  1. enough options to allow differences to show up in the results
  2. not so many options that informants have trouble knowing whether their view belongs in one box or its neighbour

If you want to compare with the results of a previous survey, the choice might be made for you because it will be best to use the same scale as before. However, even if the scales are different, we can make a broad-brush comparison by expressing the results from both surveys as percentiles. 

7 points

  Strongly disagree Disagree Slightly disagree In between Slightly agree Agree Strongly agree
I am proud to work here

6 points

  Strongly disagree Disagree Slightly disagree Slightly agree Agree Strongly agree
I am proud to work here

5 points (as above)

  Strongly disagree Disagree In between Agree Strongly agree
I am proud to work here

4 points 

  Strongly disagree Disagree Agree Strongly agree
I am proud to work here