ELC 074: Creating Effective Surveys for Instructional Design

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When you create surveys for instructional design, such as for an audience analysis or evaluation, what process do you use? Are you confident that you’ll get accurate results? There’s a large body of knowledge surrounding survey creation that can help you achieve cleaner data and more accurate results.

In this episode, I explore the best practices for creating surveys with Caroline Jarrett. Caroline is a forms specialist and the author of Surveys That Work and co-author of Forms that Work, and of User Interface Design and Evaluation. She has an MA in Mathematics and an MBA and Diploma in Statistics. And in our entire conversation, we never did any calculations.

WE DISCUSS:

• Difference between questionnaire and survey
• Different types of surveys: descriptive, comparative or tracking
• Recommendations for designing, planning and writing a survey
• Getting feedback on Twitter in two hours!
• Why you shouldn’t send surveys to a very large audience
• What you need to know about sample size
• Why the process typically requires iteration
• Who should read your questionnaire before it goes out
• Four steps (or actually five) for writing questions that get accurate answers
• Common mistakes people make in creating surveys
• Interdependent aspects of a survey (the survey octopus)
• When and how to use open-ended question
• How to organize and code answers to qualitative questions

TIME: 36 minutes

TRANSCRIPT: ELC 074: Creating Effective Surveys for Instructional Design Transcript

RESOURCES:

• Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys by Caroline Jarrett. Buy from Rosenfeld Media.
• Effortmark: Caroline’s website
• Questionnaire Design by A.N. Oppenheimer
• Designing Effective Web Surveys by Mick Couper
• The Psychology of Survey Response by Tourangeau, R., L. J. Rips and K. A. Rasinski. This is the model Caroline prefers for writing survey questions.
• The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldania
• Types of Analysis for eLearning

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