Research Tradeoffs: Good Comment
I like WordPress but I have had issues with it. First, as many people already know, some of the categories on WebWord are broken. (Still.) Second, sometimes comments do not show up. That’s really annoying because that directly impacts the folks putting in effort.
This problem happened again yesterday. As it turns out, I can’t even post any comments on certain blog entries. So, I’m going to post the comment here, as a blog entry.
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Jessica Enders writes:
Hi John
Before joining Hiser, I worked for 10 years in survey research and so I thought I might be able to (briefly) answer some of your questions.
In Australia it is recommended that a telephone survey be no longer than 20 minutes but that anything more than 10 minutes and you start to see significant declines in response rates. There is no magic “optimal” length because things such as the level of interest in the topic influence how respondents feel about their participation (as you would well know!) Check out the LIST guidelines on this page for more info:
http://cms.yourviewscount.com.au/index.cfm?p=297&search=LIST
The research would suggest that longer surveys generally result in poorer quality data than shorter ones, because respondents become disinterested and distracted as time goes on.
Balancing survey length with data quality is complex, but the short answer is for the designer to continually ask: what are we going to do with this data and why do we need it? Requiring critical justification for questions is healthy. I always recommend remembering that the survey is just a tool: a
way to get from the researcher’s question to the respondents views. If the tool is badly designed, the whole exercise fails.
Given this, survey designers definitely worry about user experience…well, the good designers do anyway! Collaborative design and testing with users should be a standard part of survey design just as it
should be a standard part of interface design. :-)
The Australian Market & Social research industry has a standard that they can be accredited to:
http://www.mrqa.com.au/public/
For information about American standards best practice, see:
http://www.aapor.org/default.asp?page=survey_methods/standards_and_best_practices
I hope this helps!