Creating Survey Questions

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Mike Mitchell, and today, I'm going to explain how to make survey questions. The first thing you need to think about when making a survey question, is what kind of information you want. Some survey questions ask for simple yes or no answers, and other survey questions ask for longer, more detailed explanations. Generally for survey questions, the easiest and simplest survey question, is a yes or no answer, to a survey question. The second type would offer possible suggestions as answers, and those are normally with an A, B ,C, or D variable. The third type of survey question, is what we call an open ended question, and this is normally a fill in the blank, or something where the answer has to supplied, only by the person filling in the survey. The best thing about the third type, is that there is no answer provided, by the survey giver, and so the person filling in the survey, must provide their entire information on their own. For types 1 and 2, the answers oftentimes are biased in one direction, and so the surveys tend to supply an intended answer, and sometimes can skew the results, based on what the person thinks the survey wants to have as their answer. After you have created your survey, the next step in the process, is how do you tabulate or count, the answers to your survey questions? Obviously, with types 1 & 2, it's a relatively easy process. You just simply count up the yeses and the nos, or the various letter combinations, and you have your totals. For the third type however, with the open ended answer, the tabulation is sometimes more difficult, because you have a lot more variation, and the answers are not quite as easy to fit into simple categories, so when you're creating your survey, these are things to think about, as well as to how you're going to tabulate and use the answers at the end. There are forms that you can use. In the United States, there are forms called Scantrons, that are those famous little fill in the circles, and there are even now websites, and net based survey applications, that can help you to create these surveys as well."