Tag Archives: Research

5 Things to Consider When Planning a Survey

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Planning out the details of how your organization will conduct a survey helps to make sure that conducting the survey is a good use of the organization’s time and resources and the results provide insight for answering the research question that was the reason for conducting the survey.

The video below briefly discusses 5 important factors to consider when planning a survey. 

As briefly discussed in the above video, 5 important things to consider are:

  1. Clearly defining what the research objectives are. Narrowing it down and getting specific about what it is that you want or need to know is important before conducting a survey.
  2. Verifying that conducting a survey is the best way to go about answering your research objectives. Once your research objectives are clearly defined you can decide if a survey and not another method, such as a focus group, an in-depth interview, a secondary data analysis, etc. is the best method to use.
  3. Deciding on or clarifying who is your target sample. Is there a certain demographic who’s opinion you want on this topic? For example, are you doing this survey as part of a community health assessment where you want a sample that’s representative of the population of the community or is it more narrow, such as if you’re conducting a customer satisfaction survey so you would want a sample of your customers to survey. Or do you only want a specific segment of those customers, such as those who purchased a particular product?
  4. Deciding on your desired sample size taking into account factors such as the response rate you would expect to get, statistics such as the sample size you would need if you want a 95% Confidence Interval, or a 90% Confidence Interval, and other related factors.
  5. Determining how you will conduct the survey based on the best way to reach your target sample to get them to complete the survey, the sample size you want, your organization’s budget and resources for conducting this survey, and other related factors.

Having a well planned out survey will ensure that your organization’s time and resources  used to conduct the survey will be put to good use and that the survey results will provide valuable insight into what it is you were trying to find out through using a survey as a research method. 

A few resources to get more information on planning a survey are:

Visualizing Population Data & Change in Population in Tableau

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Population data and the percent change in population are two demographic measures that are great to look at for a variety of different reasons.

There are many different ways to visualize these two measures, depending what it is that you want to learn from this data or show to others in a presentation. In this post and in the video we demonstrate two different ways to do so using Tableau.

One way is to display the population data on a map. This is helpful especially if geography is important to what you are working on with this population data. For example if you are presenting different population sizes of different cities to a group of stakeholders who are not familiar with the locations of those cities or how far away or close to each other they are, then visualizing this on a map for them can help show this to them.

The percent change in population can also be visualized on a map. However, a better way to show percent change in population could be a bar graph.

The second way to display population data is with a bar graph, such as the bar graph shown in the video below for population change in 5 East Coast cities of Atlanta, Boston, New York City, Richmond (VA), and Washington D.C.

As you can see in the video, the interactive bar graph created using Tableau makes it easier to see which city had the greatest population change over the two five year periods looked at in this data set. 

Three Minute Tuesday Videos by RILLIAN, a consulting agency, briefly cover a topic in approximately 3 minutes or less. These videos are provide brief overviews of topics that are useful for anyone working in the areas of Research & Insights Leading to Learning, Innovation, And actioN (R.I.L.L.I.A.N.).

Are there any helpful tips you would like to add about visualizing population data or population change data in Tableau?

Do you have any suggestions for topics you would like to see us cover in our Three Minute Tuesday videos?

Email Jillian at Jillian.Regan@RILLIANconsulting.com .