Hot and Tasty
Recently, I was the recipient of an opinion survey from an organization with which I do business. To protect the innocent, let’s say the questions went something like this… Were the biscuits hot and tasty? Was the room clean and comfortable? Would you stay here again or recommend the property?
With any of these questions, it’s impossible to know what I was really thinking by my answer. Perhaps I found the biscuits to be pleasantly warm from the oven, but alas, not so delicious. How do I answer?
Unfortunately, surveyors make the common mistake of combining questions with conjunctions rather than parsing them out (e.g. Were the biscuits hot? Were the biscuits tasty?). Why do these combo questions happen? Here are two answers that may have little to do with the caliber of the survey company responsible for data gathering.
First, a project team fails to prioritize a collective understanding of what they are trying to measure. Creating clear and specific criteria is a time-consuming task. Human nature leads us to assume we are all singing from the same choir book already–no consensus required.
Second, surveyors forget to consider the perspective or language of their audience. Perhaps by hot and tasty, the survey creator really meant satisfying. Even trickier, words can have different meanings in different parts of the country or world. It’s essential to take these nuances into consideration when you are crafting questions and trying to gather meaningful data.
So it is with surveys as it is with all communications, word choice, sentence structure, and audience perspective always matter.
We hope you found this post hot and tasty…or at least, satisfying.
