Rescue this survey
Introduction to Social Research Methodology
Scenario
You are the junior research team advising the board of Meridian, a mid-sized Polish retail-and-services company with around 450 employees, 32 stores, and a growing e-commerce arm. Staff turnover has risen from 14% to 27% in two years, and exit interviews keep mentioning one theme: scheduling — shift patterns, rota changes, and work–life balance.
Before your team could design anything, the Operations Director “saved everyone some time” by drafting an employee opinion poll himself and circulating it for sign-off. It is reproduced below, exactly as he wrote it. Your job today is to stop it, fix it, and replace it with an instrument that will actually measure something.
Work in pairs. You will need one device with internet access per pair for Task 2, and access to Google Forms or Microsoft Forms.
Task 1: Diagnose the damage (20 minutes)
Below is the Operations Director’s draft. Each of the ten items exhibits a distinct, named questionnaire flaw covered in today’s session — one flaw is a problem not of wording but of the relationship between two adjacent items.
Dear colleague, please complete this short poll. It will only take a moment.
1. How satisfied are you with your pay and your opportunities for promotion at Meridian? Very satisfied / Fairly satisfied / Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied / Fairly dissatisfied / Very dissatisfied
2. Don’t you agree that Meridian’s new flexible scheduling policy is one of the best things about working here? Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree
3. Our CEO has said that hard-working employees have nothing to fear from the new performance targets. Do you agree with her? Yes / No
4. How effectively does your store leverage cross-functional synergies to optimise the omnichannel customer journey? Very effectively / Quite effectively / Not very effectively / Not at all effectively
5. How many hours do you usually work in a typical week? Up to 20 / 20–30 / 30–40 / 40 or more
6. How long have you worked at Meridian? Less than 1 year / 1–3 years / 4–6 years / 7–10 years
7. I do not think that management is failing to keep staff informed about changes that affect them. Strongly agree / Agree / Neither agree nor disagree / Disagree / Strongly disagree
8. How many customers have you served over the past 12 months? _________ (please write in a number)
9. How well does the new computerised rota system meet your scheduling needs? (This question requires an answer.) Very well / Fairly well / Not very well / Not at all well
10. Overall, how satisfied are you with your working schedule at Meridian? Very satisfied / Fairly satisfied / Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied / Fairly dissatisfied / Very dissatisfied
For each item (1–10), in your pair:
- Name the flaw, using the terminology from today’s session (e.g. “double-barrelled”, “leading”, “non-exhaustive categories”). Be precise: “it’s confusing” is a symptom, not a diagnosis.
- Explain in one sentence what would go wrong with the data — what would the answers mean, or fail to mean?
- Rewrite the item (or, where the flaw calls for it, fix its placement or response options) so that it would survive review. If an item should be split into two, split it; if a category set needs rebuilding, rebuild it.
Keep written notes — you will be asked to defend two of your diagnoses in the plenary discussion.
Hint for the trickiest one: read items 9 and 10 as a sequence, and think about what today’s session said about question order.
Task 2: Build and pilot the replacement (25 minutes)
The board still wants evidence on the scheduling problem. Your pair will now build the instrument the Operations Director should have asked for: a short CAWI questionnaire on satisfaction with scheduling at Meridian, implemented in Google Forms or Microsoft Forms.
Build (15 minutes)
Your questionnaire must contain 6–8 items and follow this structure:
- Introductory text at the top of the form, including: who is running the survey and why, roughly how long it takes, a statement that participation is voluntary and answers are anonymous, and a consent line (e.g. “By continuing, you confirm that you agree to take part”).
- Grouped items: closed questions organised into at least two labelled topic groups (for example: your current schedule and rota changes and communication), each group introduced by a one-line statement of what it covers. Use the response-format rules from today: labelled, balanced scales; exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories; a “don’t know” or “not applicable” option wherever some staff genuinely could not answer.
- One open question at the end, inviting anything the closed questions missed.
Apply everything from Task 1 in reverse: no double barrels, no leading or loaded wording, no negations, no jargon, nothing respondents cannot recall or will not share.
Pilot (10 minutes)
Swap devices with a neighbouring pair: complete their form while they complete yours, thinking aloud as you go. Then take your form back and, together, record two specific things the pilot caught — an item the pilots misread, a missing category, an ambiguous word, a question they could not answer, a technical fault in the form. Write both down in the form “problem → what we changed”. If your pilot found nothing, you were not watching closely enough — ask your pilots what they hesitated over.
Task 3: Plan the fieldwork (10 minutes)
The corrected questionnaire will go to all 450 Meridian employees: CAWI for office and e-commerce staff with company e-mail, PAPI on paper in the 32 stores for staff without it. Your pair now drafts the contact strategy for the CAWI arm.
Produce two things:
- The invitation e-mail, written out in full (it can be short — aim for under 150 words). It must state: who is running the survey and its purpose; how long it takes; that participation is voluntary; how anonymity is protected; the deadline; and where the link goes. Decide, and note beneath the draft, who should be named as the sender — and in one sentence, why.
- A reminder schedule for a fieldwork window of your choosing (2–3 weeks): list each planned contact with its day, its audience (everyone, or non-respondents only), and a one-line description of its message. Add one sentence on what you will monitor during fieldwork and one on what you would do if stores respond at half the rate of head office.
Be ready to read your invitation aloud — the class will judge whether they would click the link.