Survey Engagement, Solution or Fig Leaf?

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Nobody pays me to write any of the copy on my blog, and should I ever have the good fortune that they do, I will declare it. My main employment is as the owner and principal of The Future Place consultancy. The Future Place provides two key services 1) training and services to industry and academic bodies and 2) consultancy services to companies. The details of the companies I work with are a private matter, but if I blog about any company who has paid The Future Place more than expenses recently (approx. two years) I will mention that they are a client. I hold equity in Virtual Surveys and provide consulting services to them from time to time. I am paid to run courses for a number of trade bodies and over the last few years clients have included ESOMAR, AMSRS, MRS, and MRIA.

I have been reading up on survey quality and engagement quite a bit recently, including comments by Survey Sampling’s Pete Cape, two great studies by Bernie Malinoff, research by GMI’s Jon Pulleston and listening Joel Rubinson talk about the results of the ARF ORQC research, it is clear that bad surveys lead to bad data.

However, the problems in descending order of importance are:

Long surveys, this is the number one problem.
Boring and incomprehensible surveys
Surveys that lack engagement.

Whilst very little is being done to address long surveys and badly structured questions, the term respondent engagement seems to be on everybody’s lips.

Don’t get me wrong! I do think we should be looking at ways of making surveys more engaging and in particular more intuitive. But as Bernie Malinoff has shown, pretty does not always work better, so plenty of checking is called for. I think some of Jon's good results at GMI are because he has made the instruments more intuitive.

However, I think the key point is the one that Reg Baker makes when he talks about the changes to the look of surveys as being like putting lipstick on a pig. If the survey is still too long and the questions are still incomprehensible or are still bad psychometric instruments, then it is still a pig.