8 Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Surveys for Your Enterprise Part 2

In our last survey post, we looked at four common survey mistakes that should be avoided to ensure success. It is critical to the development and improvement of your organization that your surveys be effective.

Through proper survey planning and implementation, the feedback gathered allows you to identify and meet the needs of your audiences whether that is students, employees or customers. Today’s post will focus on four common mistakes to avoid including too many answer choices and untargeted survey distribution.

5. Too little or too many choices:

   A common survey mistake is having either too few answer choices or too many options. If you provide too few options, you may force the respondent into selecting a choice that is not representative. Giving respondents too many choices can lead to confusion and make analyzing the results difficult. You can avoid this by offering the most common 5-6 answers and also by providing an ‘other’ or ‘none’ option.

6. Introducing bias:

   Writing survey questions is an art as well as a science. The words you use in the questions can affect respondents’ reaction and choices. Also the sequence of questions can affect how participants will respond resulting in inaccurate data. Be sure to write questions that are free of bias and opinions and always use neutral language. You can also avoid bias by beginning the survey with general questions, which will not influence the questions that come thereafter.

7. Unclear scales:

   It is important that you clearly define and explain the rating scale to ensure respondents can answer accurately. If the scale is not clearly defined, participants may become confused as to how to answer. Another common mistake is to reverse the scale order within a survey. An example would be a survey that uses a five point satisfaction scale: 1) very satisfied 2) somewhat satisfied 3) neutral 4) somewhat dissatisfied 5) very dissatisfied that then completely reverses the order to: 1) very dissatisfied 2) somewhat dissatisfied 3) neutral 4) somewhat satisfied 5) very satisfied. This will either confuse readers or they will not notice and continue to answer believing the scale has remained the same.

8. Untargeted distribution:

   Another common survey mistake is to send out surveys haphazardly just to obtain a desired number of responses. Where you may want a large sample size the sample should not be used unless it is relevant. You want to ensure that the correct target audience receives your survey so that you obtain accurate, representative data. Be sure to clearly define the goal of your survey and research the target audience to ensure the correct respondents receive the questionnaire.

It is important that you plan and design effective surveys to gather accurate and useful data. If you do not obtain reliable data, any steps you undertake for organizational or individual development could then be false and ineffective. Basing strategic business decisions on faulty data could lead to significant loss and hinder the efforts of continuous improvement and innovation.