Suvery's

One interesting topic from Chapter 13 that invades my daily life, is Surveying. At work, as an HR Specialist, I often create, implement and disseminate surveys to my company in an attempt to receive object and honest feedback to better serve my company. The interesting I have learned from creating surveys for my company, is how hard it actually is to write a good survey, and also, how hard it is to get a good response from that survey. Since we do not want to force people to take our surveys (that would create a bias) we normally list the surveys in the lunchroom or in our company-wide newsletter, using free sites such as SurveyMonkey. The problem herein lies with response rate. Since we are such a small company, even if half of our employees respond, to generalize the date to all employees would be hard to do. Also, when writing a survey about health and nutrition (I’m about to launch a Fitness Campaign at work) for the company, it is difficult to come up with questions that are not leading or manipulative to compile the information I wish in order to shape the Fitness Campaign in the direction I want. In addition, with such a sensitive topic, it was difficult to write questions which would not cross boundaries at work, such as weight and exercise, which in other settings would be appropriate. For this reason, the section in Chapter 13 on survey research was valuable and interesting to read since it pertains to what I do at work.