February 2024
- See Which Questions Have Correlated Responses
- Root Out Respondent Bias in Your Survey
- Ask for Raw Data Rather Than a Calculation
- Reconsider Often-Skipped Questions
- Push Respondents to Discriminate among Selections
- Code Text Comments
- Think Through the Order of Your Series Invitations
- Report Intelligibly on Ratios and Percentages
- Complement Survey Data with Interviews or Focus Groups
- Ask About Sensitive Topics Indirectly
- Add an Importance Question When You Ask for Ratings
- Embellish the Report Sparingly with Design Elements
- Prevent Breaches of Confidentiality by Triangulation
- Deploy the Do’s and Don’ts of Data Bar Displays
- Adjust Compensation Data for Local Cost of Living
- Spread Word that Your Survey is Open
- Provide Summaries beyond Averages and Medians
- Handle the Quirks of Upward Evaluation Surveys
February 2023
- Spot Duplicate Submissions of Individuals and Decide What to Keep
- Recognize the Trade-Offs in Survey Decisions
- Optimize the Return on Your Investment with Publicity
- Consider Alternatives to Releasing a Public Report
- Introduce the Questionnaire at the Top
- Detail the Credibility of Changes in Metrics Over Time
- Deal with Range Questions, or Don’t Ask Them
- Share Email Lists, but Cautiously
- Know What’s Different about Internal Surveys
- Collect Revenue from a Survey Project
- Answer Invitees Who Ask Questions about the Survey
- Send Periodic, Cumulative Reports
- Open Up Canned Emails
- Drop Attrition of Respondents Who Start Your Survey
- Appreciate the Levels of Sophistication in a Report
- Allow Adequate Time to Complete the Project
- Make No Mistakes about Error Messages
- Encourage Respondents to Finish the Survey
- Protect Your Report from Wrongful Distribution
- Offer Incentives for Invitees to Take the Survey
- Mix Negative and Positive Versions of Selections or Questions
- Make Sure Graphics Can be Readily Understood
- Think Carefully Whether to Disclose Participating Firms or Departments
- Reproduce the Questions and Instructions in the Appendix
- Draw Insights from Gaps between Ratings
- Deliberately Order the Questions
- Weigh Considerations about Adding a Consultant to the Team
- Offer a Webinar to Discuss the Results
- Follow Your Survey with a Second, Drill-Down Effort
January 2023
- State Respondents per Question with N =
- Be Wary of the Echo Chamber of Multi-year Surveys
- Weight Response Data to Better Match the Population
- Validate Answers with Your Hosting Software
- Extract Topics of Comments or Free Text with LDA
- Create Drop-Down Selection Lists
- Qualify Participants Who Complete the Survey
- Preserve Proprietary Advantages of a Survey, but Narrowly
- Calculate the Median Absolute Deviation (MAD)
- When Done, Critique Your Methodology, Analysis, and Scope
- Export Early Responses or Pre-Test Data and Review
- Assess Whether a Response is Genuine
- Understand the Importance of Margin of Error
- Send Email Invitations in Waves
- Foresee Issues to Resolve if You Collaborate on a Survey
- Take Advantage of Script Programming Languages:
- Impute Missing Data:
- Decide When it’s Time to End Data Collection:
- Shorten the Names of Variables
- Know the Advantages and Disadvantages of Online Surveys
- Choose Among Text, Lists, Tables, Charts and Infographics
December 2022
- Identify Gender of Respondents
- Don’t Ask for Binary Answers such as 'Yes/No'
- Consider Collaborating with Consulting Firms or Vendors
- Ask Respondents to Send Completion Emails
- Track Methods and Sources of Responses
- Take Advantage of Bulk Email Apps
- Handle Questions with Numerous Selection Choices
- Analyze Interactions of Categorical Variables with Chi-square Tests
- Why COOs might Pass on a Free Compensation Survey
- Identify Possibly Erroneous Responses (Outlier Detection)
- Deal with the Clean-up Challenges of Changing the Question Set
- Change the Question Set, but Cautiously
June 2022
- Learn to Like Likert Questions
- Report the Full Methodology of Your Project
- Wrestle with "Not Applicable" and "Don't Know"
- Recognize the Planets of Knowledge Orbiting the Solar Survey
- Publish Blog Posts about Your Survey Results
- Integrate Spreadsheets and Your Scripting Language
- Avoid ‘and’ and ‘or’ Questions or Items to Select
- Use Word Clouds and Sentiment to Understand Text Comments
- Use Associations and Bigrams to Understand Text Comments
- Choose Your Survey Hosting Software
- Relegate Additional Material to the Appendix
- Disqualify Unacceptable Responses
- Add an Acknowledgement Section to Your Report
- Build in Skip Logic with Conditional Questions
- Extract Ideas from Text Responses -- Manual Coding
- Supplement Your Data with External Data
- If Necessary, Move Back the Closing Date
- Construct Index Variables, but Carefully
- Choose a Complementary Team for the Survey Project
May 2022
- Unleash Natural Language Processsing on Survey Comments
- Set Time Frames for Questions
- Enlist a Subject Matter Expert (SME)
- Be Wary How Long a Survey Takes
- Avoid Bias in Item Order for Multiple-choice Questions
- Take Time to Clean Your Response Data
- Be Sensitive to Priorities Questions
- Ask for a Business Email Address
- Instruct Respondents How to Answer Questions
- Try Various Methods to Increase Participation
- Binify Numbers into Categorical Variables
- Test and Review the Draft Survey
- Sidestep Demographic Demons
- Craft Carefully the Invitational Email
- Try to Cure Anonymous Responses
- Limit the Number of Questions Required to be Answered
- Standardize the Categories of "Other" Responses
- Time and Craft the First Email Reminder
- Set Thresholds for Partial Responses
...