Graduate Survey
Word Count: 653
For our group's market research, I made a survey for graduates to complete after researching how to make a survey.
I first looked into how many questions are best for a survey as "the more questions you ask, the less time your respondents spend answering each question" (Chudoba, n.d) and this could lead to the data being unreliable. From this, I thought about prioritising the most important questions to keep the survey as short as possible as I found that the 'golden standard' for an online survey is between 10-12 minutes (Wigmore, 2022). According to Chudoba, respondents spend nearly half the average amount of time on questions for survey's under 30 questions compared to over 30 questions and so I aim to keep this surveys under 30 questions. (Chudoba, n.d).
I started the survey by informing the participant about the research and explaining how the data would be used, helping to build trust with the participant due to transparency and complying with GDPR.
To make sure that all participants were willing to take part in the survey, I included a section where they could confirm their consent. This is important for ethical reasons as it helps to ensure that the participant's participation is voluntary.
For participants that wish to withdraw from the research or request further information about the study after providing their consent, I provided my university email address as a form of contact; further building trust, demonstrating our commitment to participant privacy and hopefully making them feel at ease about completing this survey.
To be able to determine our target audience I included questions, that would only reveal age and gender while making sure that the survey did not request any personal information such as names or contact details. This allowed us to collect the demographic information we needed without compromising the privacy of the participants and this adheres to GDPR legislation.
I also made sure to keep open-ended questions nearer to the end of the survey as, according to Kantar, "open-ended questions too early in the survey…can set a negative expectation with respondents, and lead to increased drop out or frustration" (Kantar, 2021).
In my research I found it would be a good idea to use routing in the survey as it "can increase a respondent's likelihood of completing a survey by 100 to 200%" (Kantar, 2022). By doing this, it enables participants to skip irrelevant questions for them.
I used this feature in Section 1 of my survey where the last question asked whether the participant was currently employed. If the participant answered 'no,' routing enables the next set of questions in Section 2 to be skipped entirely and proceed directly to Section 3.
Therefore, routing allowed for a more tailored survey for the participant. This can improve the overall experience for our participants and result in lower dropout rates.
Responses
From our survey, we were able to gain valuable insights through the data which helped us to determine our target audience. However, we were only able to base these results on a sample size of 16 people.
Although a bigger sample size would have provided more reliable and accurate results, our results from the small sample were still helpful. Going forward, I understand to have more reliable data we would need to continue to collect responses and expand our sample size.
According to the data collected, the majority of our target audience is female, with 75% of survey participants identifying as female and 25% as male.
Furthermore, we discovered that most of our target audience falls within the age range of 21-28 years old, with 75% of participants selecting this option.
Overall, the insights we gained from our survey results enable us to be able to create more targeted and effective content. This information also helps us to make more informed decisions about our business.
The full survey can be seen below.
Illustrations
Figure 1 - Morley, J. (2023) Screenshot of Survey 1 [jpeg].
Figure 2 - Morley, J. (2023) Screenshot of Survey 2 [jpeg].
Figure 3 - Morley, J. (2023) Age Pie Chart [jpeg].
Figure 4 - Morley, J. (2023) Gender Pie Chart [jpeg].
References
Chudoba, B. (n.d). How long should a survey be?. Survey Monkey. https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/curiosity/survey_completion_times/
Kantar. (2021). Get the best survey data by choosing the right question type. Kantar. https://www.kantar.com/north-america/inspiration/research-services/get-the-best-survey-data-by-choosing-the-right-question-type-pf
Kantar. (2022). What is a good survey length for online research?. Kantar. https://www.kantar.com/inspiration/research-services/what-is-a-good-survey-length-for-online-research-pf
RMS Blog Staff. (2014). RMS Results. https://rmsresults.com/2014/07/14/7-tips-to-boost-graduate-survey-response-rates/
Wigmore, S. (2022). What is a good survey length for online research?. Kantar. https://www.kantar.com/north-america/inspiration/research-services/what-is-a-good-survey-length-for-online-research-pf