Features

Web-based surveying and best practices in Business and Administrative Services

Shannon Thorn, Business Services

Providing excellence in customer service and developing new ways to gather customer feedback are essential components of Business and Administrative Services' (BAS) mission. In January of this year, the BAS Customer Advocacy Committee (CAC) was formed to educate one another on the services that their departments provide to the campus community, collect customer feedback, and communicate that feedback to our customers. It was the consensus of this committee that a web-based survey system would be desirable in achieving the goals of this group, and several survey packages were evaluated by the team. The BAS CAC is now in the process of developing test surveys, which will be piloted by Business Services Loans and Receivables, Environmental Health and Safety, Material Management Procurement, Physical Plant Custodial Unit, and Printing Services (for Campus Copy, Printing, and Mail Services). Many lessons were learned along the way, and in the process best practices were consulted in the development of our surveys. Following is a summary of best practices, as adapted from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (http://www.aapor.org/main1.html), a leading organization in the field of survey best practices.

A summary of best practices for surveys

• Have specific goals for the survey.
• Consider alternatives to using a survey to collect information.
• Select samples that represent the population to be studied.
• Use designs that balance costs with errors.
• Take care in matching question wording to the concepts being measured and the population studied.
• Pretest questionnaires and procedures to identify problems prior to the survey.
• Construct quality checks for each stage of the survey.
• Maximize cooperation or response rates within the limits of ethical treatment of human subjects.
• Use statistical, analytic, and reporting techniques appropriate to the data collected.
• Carefully develop and fulfill pledges of confidentiality given to respondents.
• Disclose all methods of the survey to permit evaluation and replication.

An expanded discussion of these best practices is available at Survey best practices (/bcc/Fall2001/feat.surveybestprac.html). Whether the surveys you develop are web- or paper-based, these guidelines will serve you well.

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Berkeley Computing & Communications, Volume 11, Number 4 (Fall 2001)
Copyright 2001, The Regents of the University of California