Conducting mail and telephone surveys

Summary form only given, substantially as follows. More and more professional communicators are using surveys to learn more about their audiences and to assess technical communication products, and yet, few communication professionals have had the opportunity to learn how to conduct surveys. Handled carefully, mail and telephone surveys can provide practicing communicators an effective, professional research technique for gathering detailed and useful information about their readers and evaluating their technical communications. This paper provides an understanding of the survey process and its major pitfalls and how to avoid them. I begin with an overview of the survey process and then elaborate on selected activities: planning, questionnaire development, sampling, data collection alternatives, coding and data analysis. Specifically, I discuss strategies for developing specific objectives, drafting and ordering questions, pre-testing the questionnaire, revising the questionnaire and producing the questionnaire; explain random vs. non-random sampling, applications and limitations, and their influence on data interpretation; explore strategies for selecting the appropriate data analysis, developing a code book, coding data and analyzing data; and detail common problems including a closer look at leading questions, double-barreled questions, overlapping categories, loaded questions, long, complex questions, jargon and negative questions