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Unread 30-10-2014, 01:41
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Tristan Lall Tristan Lall is offline
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Re: Mentor Involvement Survey

A few comments on survey methodology:
  • It's conventional to put the demographic questions at the end, because a lot of respondents are somewhat wary of providing it. If they feel that way, and quit before completing it, at least you have their other substantive responses.1 (If the demographics are a core part of the analysis, this isn't always valid.)
  • Questions like
    Quote:
    How did you get involved with mentoring robotics?
    Parent of a student? Sponsor involvement? Experience as a student yourself in robotics competition? Teacher at a school?
    lend themselves to multiple choice responses, because that yields categorical data straight from the survey. (Compared to free-form data, categorical data is more powerful for making generalized conclusions, because there are relatively unambiguous ways to compare it with other data.) By instead providing a text box, you end up having to parse the data and code it for key concepts, which is time-consuming. If you want to hear the stories people tell in answering that, consider multiple choice first, plus an optional text box.
  • Alternatively, sometimes you don't know what categories you need...so in that case, a trial survey can be conducted where you gather a small (statistically insignificant, but likely sufficient to guide your intuition) sample, and generate your full list of categories based on the ideas people provide.
  • There are some subtle assumptions that you (probably) shouldn't make in crafting the questions. For instance, how should a mentor for an all-year school respond to the questions about summer and the school year? And should a New Zealand team member respond in terms of their summer, or the North American summer that more closely defines a robotics season?
  • Since you're looking for trends over time, you may want to ask about how a person's responses would have changed over the years. Personally, my involvement is quite different than it used to be, but that's not captured with the present-focused questions.
  • A simple privacy policy would be nice. (Say how the data will be used and shared. Will the data be available for peer review?)
  • You may prefer to use a survey service like SurveyMonkey, because it's designed to implement the sorts of refinements that social scientists use when they do research.

Despite those comments, this is a very good survey, and I look forward to hearing what you conclude.

1 Though I'm not sure that's actually the case with Google Forms; it looks like if they quit, you probably get no data. Traditional telephone surveys and most online surveys will still count partial responses.

Last edited by Tristan Lall : 30-10-2014 at 01:47.
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