Welcome back. So, I'm curious. Have you ever been asked to answer a survey and felt completely annoyed by it even before you started the survey? Chances are you probably have at some point, right? If so, it most likely is because the client did not know you very well before making their ask. In this lesson, you will learn to select the optimal survey method given particular constraints. After this lesson, you will be able to identify relevant constraints that will shape your choice of the survey methods and be able to select the best survey method to use in a given scenario. Okay? So, let's dive in. There are several survey options from which to choose. We listed some of the most common ones in the previous module including online, phone, in-person and direct mail. From the 1940s to the 1970s, mail and face-to-face surveys were the main modes of data collection. Telephone interviewing of samples generated by random digit dialing became an especially popular method. The emergence of internet surveys in the 1990s threatened the dominance of telephone surveys due to their advantages in terms of cost and speed. Nevertheless, there are still problems with Internet coverage in the United States primarily in rural centers. Of course, this definitely affects the representativeness of online surveys. For this course, our aim is to create an online survey and implement it. However, you will need to know how to go about arriving at the choice of method or methods to use for a survey. For example, some situations will call for an online survey but you may want to add another survey method. Let's look at how to approach such decisions. As you set out to choose the most appropriate survey method for your market research project, you must be guided by constraints. Your constraints include budget, time, resources and access to the sample, both human and technological and the scope of your project. For example, if you're the only researcher working on a project and you must deliver survey results tomorrow and your client wants at least 400 responses, your time constraint would dictate that doing in-person surveys or live phone surveys definitely are not realistic options. However, if you have access to an online survey platform, an expansive email list or your market segment, an Internet access, the choice indicated to meet those constraints would be an online survey. Still, it's rare that you would be able to get 400 responses in just one day. Let's think about the common methods and how the choice to use that method is shaped by time. When you're thinking about the time component for each type of research, it depends on a variety of factors. Number one, is there a hard and fast deadline you need to meet or will your client take a top line report followed by a full report? A top line captures the highlights of the data once data collection is finished. Two, do they want personal responses from specific people? Three, will there be incentives given to the respondents? In general, an online survey will get the fastest results. Surveys are easier to read especially with automatic page changes and skips built into the questionnaire. These types of surveys are easy to farm out to an online firm where you can use their research panels or lists. But if your client wants things done fast, other things might get cut off like personal involvement from your specific customers. Let's think about the common methods and how the choice to use a specific method can be shaped by the budget. Surveying costs money whether it is via an online survey or phone survey. So, when you're thinking about budget, which method do you think costs the most and costs the least? Online surveys appear to be cheaper than phone surveys because all you need is a software or tool. You don't need to hire someone to make the physical calls. Furthermore, online survey software can automatically compile, sort the responses and place them into neat reports or Excel spreadsheet. Online survey tools start from about $15 per month and can range to over $100 per month depending on the detail of customer feedback you want to gather and how many customers you want to survey. On the flip side, phone surveys are much more expensive. You need to hire an employee or company to conduct the phone calls and enter the results into a database manually. Keeping in mind that it may take up to five calls to reach each customer, you can see that it can become a very time consuming and expensive endeavor. Think how much it would cost to hire someone for three hours per day over two weeks. That's 30 hours in total. And with an average wage of $20 per hour, that's $600. A mail survey involves the cost of the paper that you usually want to have printed professionally and the cost of the postage out and return. It is best to use bulk mail methods if you have more than 500 surveys to send out in the mail. You will need to pay people to open those envelopes and enter the data. The in-person interview is usually the most expensive since you have to hire interviewers. It is time consuming and incentives for the interviewees may be involved. On the other hand, if you have excellent interviewers, it is a real selling point to a client who wants the personal touch. Let's think about our common survey method and how the choice to use that method can be shaped by resources. When you're thinking about resources, it can mean where you would best find your sample and your interviewers, your data entry people or your analyst. It doesn't matter if you will be doing a mail, phone, email or in-person interview if your client already has a list they will provide and you have interviewers, data entry people and an analyst. You are all set to start your project. What I usually do is outline a budget for each cost and use it as a guideline for hiring extra people as needed. Some RFPs ask you to list all these as line items for the budget. Let's suppose you have a situation where the constraints are time. You have determined the market segment to be college students age 18 to 24. The business question you are looking to answer pertains to cell phone use. You might have thought about entering specific classrooms on campus and ask each teacher to let you circulate a survey to each student in a class. Perhaps you have found out that this type of surveying is not allowed on campus. Instead, since most students have an email account, I might arrive at the decision to use an online survey like the one we will design and implement in this module. It will be cost effective and get a fast response if an incentive like a free Starbucks coupon for a cup of coffee is included after the student completes the survey. Well, that does it for our lesson on selecting the survey method to use. After this lesson, you should now be able to identify the constraints relevant to this choice and select the most appropriate survey method or methods to use.
