Survey / aka Questionnaire
What is it? A survey contains a set of baseline questions about a particular topic to collect self-reported and self-recorded data from a large number of individuals in a specific category. Ideally, the results are intended to achieve statistical significance. Responses may be provided in written, video and or oral formats. Surveys are a structured tool used in quantitative research. They use the numerical data resulting from the survey to identify large-scale trends using statistical methods to determine causal and correlative relationships between variables.
When is it best used? Surveys are used to generate numerical data that measures experience, employee or customer satisfaction, trends and foresight, market research, product research, benchmarking, attitudes, behaviors, opinions and research participant selection and management (aka recruiting screeners and building participant pools).
The majority of market research surveys are sent to a group of people, from a sample panel, either stored in a customer database or a third party consumer network database. UX research, on the other hand, almost always uses a customer or prospect database when recruiting.
What does it entail? At minimum, a survey requires a research plan with clear objectives, a well designed questionnaire/survey, and a platform to present the survey to the target audience and calculate the responses.
Surveys can be conducted as an online or in-person intercept (in the midst of a process) or post-engagement (after an action has been completed). They may be one time events or recur at various intervals.
There are many styles of survey questions including drop menus and radio dials (single select), check boxes (multi-select), Likert scales and rankings, card sorting, sentence completion and open ended questions, and more.
Surveys can straddle between quantitative and qualitative research depending on the types of questions asked (open-ended vs. multiple choice), the number of respondents and question format. Open-ended questions are more qualitative in nature due to the unstructured nature of the responses and therefore cannot be used as numerical data points (the common purpose of a quantitative survey). They yield anecdotal perspectives to complement the quantitative data points.
During the process of taking the survey, “piping” optimizes the experience for respondents by repurposing components of previous answers to personalize their survey. Branching allows surveys to utilize skip patterns depending on previous answers to ensure respondents are only asked questions that apply to them thus yielding cleaner and relevant results.
The data collected is analyzed to produce numerical results. There are many methods to analyze survey responses such as confidence intervals, conjoint and discrete choice analysis, Maxdiff, TURF analysis, etc.
Interchangeable term: Questionnaire, email survey, online survey
Use in a sentence: The survey results show that 59% of respondents prefer the new subscription pricing structure compared to the current per use pricing we offer today.
Related terms: Intercept questionnaire, intercept survey, quantitative research, poll, opinion poll
Visual: No