The Survey Playbook

Book excerpt: Why are surveys annoying, badly written, and provide ambiguous results? Because they ignore the 9 Principles of psychology! The Survey Playbook is a how-to guide for those who want to create a successful survey and an entertaining explanation of bad survey practices for those who fill out surveys. If you are responsible for creating surveys for customers, students, members, or employees, or you are simply interested in why surveys are so annoying and poorly-written, read on! The Survey Playbook answers these questions: How do we increase our response rates? Are we asking the "right" questions? Is our survey too long? What are the best incentives? Why are our survey results ambiguous? Why don't our customers provide useful comments? People have survey fatigue - what options do we have? This book is written for: Those who create surveys for customers, students, members, employees, alumni, or prospects Do-it-yourself'ers who use SurveyMonkey or other web-based survey tools Evaluation Committee members responsible for improving their course evaluation forms Tradeshow organizers who gather feedback from exhibitors and attendees College Administrators who interpret and act on faculty evaluation results Customer Retention Specialist or others dedicated to engaging and keeping customers Directors of Training responsible for instructor evaluations Marketing Researchers who have heard conflicting messages about the usefulness of surveys Those using web-based or paper-based surveys for accreditation and evaluation purposes Those who get annoyed when wasting their time filling out poorly constructed surveys WHAT THE EXPERTS SAY: "I teach research methods and applied measurement and have developed survey instruments for many organizations. I am impressed at the quality and accuracy of the advice and instruction given in The Survey Playbook. A similar course at my university would cost you $900 and take 15 weeks to complete. I enthusiastically recommend this volume and plan to start using this book in my courses." - Jeffrey Nicholas, Ph.D. "There are ridiculously expensive workshops that are far less informative and useful than this easy-to-read gem." - Stephen Schepman, MBA, Ph.D."