One of the most common questions in Mail Survey budgeting is the kind of postage to use. Depending on your survey you may be able to cut on cost by using standard instead of first-class mail, however, think about this carefully, as you risk lowering survey response and reducing data quality. To help you decide, […]
Author Archives: Damon Young
Are you looking to streamline your Survey Return Schedule? Check out three tips for you to optimize the timing and management of your survey returns: Set an Appropriate Time Window, Don’t Jump the Gun on Subsequent Mailings, and Minimize Post Office Delays.
When done correctly, surveys are the golden key in social science research – helping us uncover the attitudes and behaviors of a target population like no other platform. As with all scientific research, however, they are susceptible to bias. Bias is a sneaky, subtle characteristic that can creep into any part of your research in […]
In our blog on “Choosing the right sample size”, we provided a formula to ensure your target population is represented accurately. Knowing that number early is important for determining your mail quantity and bidding out your project to vendors. However, it is only half the equation in survey sampling. The other half is making sure […]
In our previous blog, we outlined the basic principles of questionnaire design for writing great, effective survey questions. Of course, your overall survey design will include more than just the questions. You will also need to include a survey title, provide instructions and add a thank-you closing statement, as well as review and test […]
When starting a survey project, most people look forward to the fun, creative part of writing the questions. However, it doesn’t take long to realize that writing great survey questions is not as easy as it looks. Questionnaire design is more science than art – requiring critical attention be paid to question and answer order, […]
Multimodal or mixed-mode surveys are research surveys that use two or more forms of communication to reach respondents (e.g, telephone and email). In today’s increasingly complex, interconnected world, we now have ways of communicating that didn’t exist even a few years ago. The list of channels seems almost endless nowadays, including regular and express mail, […]
Mail surveys are among the most effective tools in the research industry, besting online, email and phone survey methods in both response rate and data integrity. As with all survey research, however, survey success begins with careful planning, including brainstorming your goals, creating questions, choosing participants, determining your budget, and perhaps most tedious, choosing materials […]
At long last, you’ve made it to the data collection stage of your survey project. It’s time to warm up the automated data collection equipment, make sure everything is programmed correctly and prepare for the results to come in. As with each stage of survey administration, there is some prep work needed to ensure accurate […]
Long gone are the days when mail survey responses were collected manually and key entered into digital format. Today, the question isn’t whether you should automate, but rather which automated data collection approach you should be using. The most commonly used data capture technologies in the survey industry today are OMR (optical mark recognition) and […]
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