ashley

I love looking for surveys at google.com and seeing what comes up.  It feels like an endless list of relationship or sexually related surveys.  “Take this survey to see how good you are in bed!” or “Wanting to find your perfect mate?  Take this survey!”

I wonder about these surveys for many reasons.  First, why would you take a survey to find out what kind of lover you are.  If you are looking for your computer to tell you it is safe to say that you aren’t.  Secondly, what kind of world do when live in where that is the most popular thing?  I hate it that people get so wrapped up in finding out about love and relationships from a computer screen. (Not to say that sometimes it’s good to get a push in the right direction from the internet sometimes.)

I think my last, and biggest, problem with these ‘find-a-mate’ surveys is the fact that people lie.  I would.  I would deffinatly not put on my ‘find-a-mate’ survey that sometimes I come off a little too abrasvie and tend to make really lame jokes (and I mean REALLY lame) whenever I get nervous.  I know that is a small trivial example, but I think in the grand scheme of things that hurts. 

I don’t know if I could ever trust and internet survey that would link me up with another person. I guess it’s like a blind date.  They could turn out to be the man or woman of your dreams, but for the most part they are the average joe lying his face off because, well…. to make himself look better.  When it comes down to it though, best of luck to the internet daters, because all said and done, it’s a hard road no matter how you go about it.

Lately in my life, it seems that surveys seem to be everywhere. Everytime I check my e-mail there seems to be some opinion poll going on. I am a student and my mail box is constantly full of surveys about parking and other activities around campus.

For the most part, these surveys are extremely helpful. As on most college campuses, parking is a big problem that most students wrestle with daily. It’s a big issue to a lot of people and I think that these surveys could really help. They could find out what is the biggest hastle for students as well as how to re-direct traffic and shuttle students to campus.

Then there are the absolutely useless ones that seems to get in everyone’s way and yet are everywhere. I am a member of myspace, which lately, is the survey meca. You can find surveys eveywhere from bullitens to blogs.

Here is a link to a place where you can fill out a survey about yourself and then post it directly on your page so that God and everyone can read your meaningful answers. And if you have some deep, meaningful questions about yourself such as: ‘Am I a good kisser?’ or ‘Am I more like Paris or Nicole?’ Then have no fear. There is also a survey that you can fill out that will tell you and even give you a html code for a sweet little picture that you can also post on your page. Rest assured, when people see that picture they will know your survey said you were a Paris.

I have been really surprised at people’s willingness to take surveys.  And not just survey’s, but personal opinion interviews. I always was scared to ask people to take a survey.  I guess I was just worried that they would view it as a great intrusion on their personal space and that taking a few minutes of their time would make them incredibly annoyed.

But for the most part, the people I have come in contact with have been more than happy to help me out and take the survey.  It seems that I am the one working myself up and the respondents don’t really mind.  In fact I seem to annoy myself just worrying about if I am going to be a bother.  People actually seem to love to do the survey when they get to voice their opinion.  It makes sense too that people would want to have their voice heard and a survey is a great way to do  that. 

When I do interviews on  the phone it is usually the same reaction.  I get nervous about what questions I need to ask and try to call them at the right time.  I try especially hard to be polite as not to make them frustrated, but when I ask them the first question they usually end up happy to talk.  In fact, for the most part I usually can only get two or  three questions in.  I guess surveys are like that in the same respect that it lets people say what they feel in an opportunity that doesn’t usually show up.

Sometimes people can be grouchy.  It is inevitable.  I usually try to tell myself to just suck it up and put on my big girl panties when someone chews me out when I try to contact them.  You just have to stay polite and hope that will be your last encounter with that person.  Anyway, we’ve all had bad days and I don’t think I would want to have someone take a survey when they were in a bad mood anyway.  Who knows what kind of venting remarks you could get to skew your survey.

It seems that whenever I get done with a survey I find that there seem to be more questions that need to be answered.  Once the answer is found to the question, or goal, asked in the survey it seems that a dozen other questions spring up.

The survey I just completed was a radio station survey, for example.  We wanted to find out what kind of music people listened to, when they listened to the radio the most, and what their general impression of the station was.  The goal of the survey was to find out what the radio station could do to get more people to listen as well as have a favorable opinion.  These questions were left open ended so that people could say exactly what their opinion was and what they liked or didn’t like.

The one question that stuck out, however, was what kind of music do you most like to listen to?  We gave the respondents a list of options to check such as country, alternative rock, hip-hop, jazz, classical… and so on.   Most of the respondents said that they listened to more alternative rock.  However, it was interesting when reading the open ended questions to hear most of those students say that they hated indie rock and wanted more mainstream, or top 40, rock and vice versa.

It became clear to us that there needed to be another survey about what “alternative rock” meant to each person.  Was it the poppy rock, the indie rock, or even the metal hard core rock.  It just seems this way with all surveys and experiments too.  Your answers always lead to more questions.

I love editing.  Well, I don’t love doing it, but I love finding mistakes I have looked over. I think its amazing that I could worked so hard, and stared so long, and still missed something.

It seems no matter how hard I work on a paper or project there always seems to be mistakes.  I could take my time and think I had gone over everything and when I get it back there are red marks.  It is so funny because I know that I am a good writer and look over my work many times before I turn it in.  What I love is how hard I have looked it over and when I get a friend to review it the smallest imperfections turn up.  Today I misspelled our.  I don’t know how, but the reviewer caught it.

 
 I always hope there will be no mistakes after several reviews.  ‘Surely by now I will have everything perfect,’ I always think.  I guess I have this vision after I work on all of my projects that it will be a Christmas Story scene where Ralphie gives his paper to the teacher and she starts writing A++++… across the chalkboard and on the walls. 
 My survey is not exempt from this (and neither is this blog!) Our group working on the survey worked at making this survey flawless.  We so carefully crafted each one of our questions.  We found the best way to reach our population. 

 
And yet, after it was sent out there were still the unmistakable flaws.  One of our questions seemed redundant and not exactly what we wanted to ask.  We didn’t send it out to really pre-test the survey, just had it reviewed.  Looking at it now, we know that reviewing doesn’t cut it when looking at our final product.  If we would have just pre-tested we would have looked at the results and realized our shortcomings.

 
But I guess this is how you learn.  This is how you make, if not a good survey, good results.  If you are honest with your client in your review and point out the mistakes, the inevitable mistakes, it will make for a better report.  I will have to do the same.
 

So I sent out my first real survey this week.  It was actually more interesting than I thought to be perfectly honest.  Sifting through results of a survey doesn’t exactly sound like my idea of fun, but to my supprise I can’t wait.  I guess we just worked really hard defining the questions and putting everything together and I’ve just gotten really into it.

 We sent our survey out on Tuesday for a class I am taking.  The class was divided up into three groups and my group was fourtunate because we got to send out our survey to the entire population we wanted to hear from.  The survey was about a student program on campus and we were able to send  the survey by e-mail to the entire student body.  Our teacher wanted to set us a goal of getting at least 400 respondants.  We thought surely around 400 would hit reply and If not we set up a plan to do random sampling around campus the following week.  It was sent out in high hopes.

Well, we not only reached our goal of 400, but in the next 24 hours over 2,000 people responded.  We actually had to upgrade the g-mail account that the finished surveys were forwarded to just to hold them all.  It was so exciting!  Here we were hoping we could get at least 400 would respond!

I guess the reason I am so shocked is because I’m not so sure I would have responded to that e-mail.  My college e-mail account is constantly cluttered with e-mails.  In fact, I would say I get at least 50 a day.  Most of the e-mails I recieve, other than the ones of cats in cute positions from my mom, are mass e-mails from professors or social organizations I am involved in.  I don’t really enjoy wading through and finding out which ones are important and usually just delete them based on title alone. 

I am so glad other people didn’t do that.  To my suprise, more guys than girls responded too.  Maybe it had to deal with the subject matter of the survey.  Perhaps  it is just this stage in a college guys life, but right now the women seem to be the more put together and responsible ones; the ones you would think would sit down and tak the survey.  After researching it on the internet I found that guys are more likely to sit and click to give an answer, where girls would rather communicate what is going on with them.  Also interesting, I read in a lot of articles that girls are more likely to lie on surveys.  Not suprising, but interesting that its been researched.  So thanks guys for helping out our survey!

When administering a survey to a random sampling of people, why is the number one concern getting back responses from people who are upset?  To me this would seem like the best reason to reach these people.

I have done a lot of phone surveys and phonathon calling in my life.  Like I said before, I used to work for my university’s fundraising phonathon team.  When we reached people who were upset with the performance of the university for any reason it was our job to listen and write it down.  These people didn’t give money, but they did feel better.  Usually anyway.  Sometimes poeple just want their problems to be heard and to know that there is the possibility of something to be done about it.  I see this as a good thing.

“Constructive criticism” are the sweet words we have called this for years.  It’s harsh.  No one really wants to see what they are doing wrong, but isn’t that the way to improve.  It’s a lame example, but that is why restaurants and some service businesses have suggestion boxes or slips to rate your visit.  There are rarely suggestions that come back saying that their experience was perfect.  There is always something to improve.  Isn’t that what PR is all about anyway?  Constantly being ready to come up with something new, whether it be a strategy, plan, campaign, that will help their client.

To me, it seems that when people tell you what is wrong that is the only way you can improve.  It seems every single time I have turned in papers to my boss or teachers they have always come back with something I “should have done” when I saw them as perfect works of art.  When you look at your product, whatever it may be, it seems fine.  It is through the eyes of others that we can see what  needs to be improved to make it better. 

My last job was working for my college as a phonathon caller.  I would call alumni, read them a script and then ask if they would like to donate money.  It wasn’t my favorite job to ever have, but looking back I learned a lot from it. 

We’ve been talking a lot in class about phone surveys and I realized how much I understood the process because of my last job.  Although I was not administering a survey, I was going about the same routine.  Just like in surveys taken over the phone I had a script to read.  The difference was that I was encouraged to stray from the bright pink or yellow paper to build rapport.  Part of my job was to build a relationship, not just to drain money.  I realized the importance of how much this effected the outcome.  When I was tired and just read the script verbatim, the responses were usually a simple “no.”  When I talked to the person as well as read the script, they were much more friendly and the person was more likely to give. 

Straying away from the script affected my results drastically.  In a phone survey it would have been important for me to stick to the lines given to me rather than freely talking like I used to because I would want the outcome to be the same.  The same question for everybody so that they could give the same kind of response.

I also am very familiar with rebuttals and prebuttals.  That was the bright pink sheet.  We hand a good idea of the excuses people generally used and typed them up on a sheet.  Our boss filled in the excuses with a paragraph of rebuttals that we could use.  In our script we always tried to answer “why” it was important to give back to the University.  That was the easiest and most common prebuttal. 

Throughout the time I have been in this class I have realized the time and thought that goes into the formation of each question on a survey.  Or in some cases, the lack there of.  At first, when coming up with questions for my own mock surveys, I thought that whatever I put down was fine.  I just asked what I wanted to ask and that was all there was to it.  Right?

I am learning as time goes on that it has to be more than simple and straightforward.  I am learning that questions that I would think to be simple could really throw some people off.  For example, when do you need to ask “what is your sex?” or “what is your gender?”  I was amazed, when I really thought about it, the simple difference in the two.  It seems simple now that I have thought about it, but at the time I just wrote it down because it made sense in my head.

It is hard to get into the mind of others and figure out how to write a question to get the exact type of answer you are looking for.  Sometimes I read questionaires and laugh at the way questions are phrased.  On one Health and Wellness survey there was a question that asked “What’s the matter with you?”  I just found it funny.  I would have thought of a better way to phrase that. 

My mom is one of those great people who loves to help others out whenever she gets a chance.  When kids put up lemonade stands she can’t help but stop because, “they worked so hard to put that on.” 

Periodically she would get these surveys or test items in the mail and was so adamant about completing them.  I never understood why she wanted to spend all of that time filling in the little bubbles for a dollar bill.  When I was little it seemed like such a waste of time, but she made me do them too.

National Family Opinion would send us surveys in the mail, or call us at home, and it would only take a few minuets to complete usually but I always moaned and groaned when she made me complete the survey. (Unless they sent me sugar cereal to try and that was fun.) 

Looking back, I’m really proud of my mom for taking all that time.  When you are the one conducting the survey, and genuinely want to know an accurate outcome, you can become almost desperate for people’s time.  I no longer look at those surveys in the same light, especially after having a telemarketing job.  I now realize the work that not only went into forming and formatting the survey, but also the simple act of getting people to take it.