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Glossary of Survey Terms
Process Development
Focus Groups: structured meetings with customers or employees used to gather qualitative information; e.g., survey content, project goals, etc. A rich resource for survey design.
Needs Analysis: a comprehensive examination of stakeholders' information requirements and goals. Used to determine survey objectives, goals and content.
Sample: a group of people selected from the population to receive a survey. Sample types include census samples, random samples, systematic samples, sample by self selection, and stratified samples.
Population: the entire group of people to be studied. For example, all employees or all customers.
Survey Development
Closed-ended Question: a question with a pre-listed response, such as 'yes/no' or scale questions.
Construct: a term used to describe an intangible idea that has been constructed for scientific purposes, such as 'motivation,' or 'customer satisfaction.'
Dimension: a group of related items measuring one area of interest, such as 'communication.'
Factor Analysis: a data analysis technique used to group survey items into dimensions and eliminate superfluous items.
Item: a single question on the questionnaire.
Open-ended question: a question with no pre-listed responses. Generally used for 'why' type questions and comments.
Questionnaire Pretest: an examination of the survey by potential respondents. Used to uncover potential problems and assess instrument quality.
Questionnaire Review: an examination and critique of an existing survey. Conducted to improve the quality of the survey.
Response Option: each possible answer to a closed-ended survey question.
Validity: measures whether findings are appropriate and meaningful. Validity refers to the inferences made, not the data that has been collected. Three main types are content validity, construct validity, and criterion-related validity.
Data Analysis
Coding: the process of reviewing open-ended responses and systematically representing similar ideas with numbers, or 'codes.'
Confidence Interval: a range for the true value, based on the relative sizes of the sample and the population. If you have computed that 93% of customers are very satisfied, 5%, the actual percentage is expected to be between 88% and 98%.
Confidence Level: generally 95% or 99%. At a 95% confidence level, 95 times out of 100 the true value will fall within the confidence interval.
Correlation: one of the most widely used measures of association. Used to tell the strength of a linear relationship between two variables. Note: correlations do not indicate causality.
Exception Reporting: used to identify those groups of respondents who vary in a statistically significant way from the rest of the population.
Key Indicators: items that have been determined, through a multiple regression analysis, to directly affect another item. Generally used as predictors.
Mean: obtained by adding all scores and dividing by total count. Also called average.
Median: the middle value of a sequential group. Generally used when mean is heavily influenced by outliers, for example, median income level.
Mode: the most frequently observed response.
Normal Distribution: results expected from surveying a large group of people. Most people will be centered around the mean, fewer people will be at the edges. An assumption for many statistical tests. Also called the bell curve.
Norms: a history of information with which to compare specific results.
Significance Tests: tests used to determine whether differences in results are meaningful. Most common tests include the t-test, Analysis of Variance, regression analysis, and chi-square test.
Standard Deviation: the square root of the variance. Provides a measure of how much scores vary from the mean.
Variance: a measure of the amount of spread in a data set. A large variance indicates that there are many scores located away from the mean.
Written Interpretive Report: an examination and synthesis of the results of the survey. Generally summarizes results, indicates any themes that arise and provides conclusions and recommendations. Relays in words and graphs how respondents answered each item and dimension.
Facilitation Results
Action Planning: examining the survey results and determining a course of action.
Customer Contact Groups: facilitated meetings between customers and company representatives.
Feedback Training: involves training managers or other supervisory personnel in the comprehension and use of data reports which will allow them to move forward with the data.
For more information:
Call: 1-800-447-3269
E-mail: info-ncs@pearson.com
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