Chapter 12
Measuring Your Fuzzy Ideas with Surveys
IN THIS CHAPTER
Identifying and operationalizing the fuzzy concepts you want to quantify
Designing and administering surveys to get good data and high response rates
Getting survey fundamentals right to avoid common survey pitfalls
When you come right down to it, a survey is just a question, or group of questions, designed to make things that are hidden inside the human mind knowable as data. Survey research, therefore, provides access to attitudes, beliefs, values, opinions, preferences, and other cognitive descriptors that, without the help of survey tools, remain anecdotal or entirely indescribable and therefore not useful to math, science, or people analytics. In other words, surveys help you convert nebulous concepts into hard numbers so that you can analyze them. Other things might be going on, but the main benefit from surveys is that they allow you to relate fuzzy concepts to more concrete and observable things, like individual and group behaviors and outcomes. To this end, surveys have been a fundamental tool in fields like psychology, sociology and political science for hundreds of years — and in newer fields, like marketing, ...
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