Objectives
What are your feelings, thoughts (e.g., what images come to your mind?) and emotions as you
go along?
What makes you want to stop, what drives you to continue?
What is easy to answer, what is difficult?
What are the merits of this questionnaire?
What are apparent shortcomings?
Statistical concerns:
1. Presence of biases
2. Response rate
Experience of the respondent:
7. Opportunities to uncover implicit structures through correlation analyses (in this case:
correlations between graduate school belonging and housing preferences).
8. Production of simple surprising (stunning) statistics
9. Connectedness with managers goals.
10. Ability to compare and monitor data over time
Compatibility between the researcher and the respondents language and ways of thinking.
Perception of reward attached to responding to the survey: upfront incentives, thanking, making
the questionnaire interesting with a storyline (self-examination value).
Reduce participation costs: contain length, allow for self-administration at leisure and at home.
Trust: dont ask questions that might beg the response
why do you ask?,
stay on topic,
promise to share results.
Dont ask questions that clearly are not genuinely intended to inform you.
Have the survey sponsored by a legitimate authority
If you currently live in Harvard housing, do you think that coordinating living arrangements with
a privately-owned housing renter would be more or less difficult than with HRES?
More or less
If you currently live in Harvard housing, what has been the single-most frustrating aspect of your
housing experience thus far?
[open-ended; to appear close to the beginning of the survey]
How do you rate the level of interactivity and active social/academic life of students within your
current housing?
[scale of 1-5]
How do you think the design and lay-out of your current housing contribute to this answer?
[1-5]
I would be in favour of designating a portion of on-campus housing as guaranteed on-campus
housing for first-year graduate students. This means that students in these apartments would
have to move out at the end of the year.
[scale of 1-5]
What changes/improvements would you like to see made to the HRES lottery process?
[open-ended]
Overall, how would you rate your housing experience at Harvard?
[significantly below expectations - below expectations - meet expectations -exceeds
expectations - exceeds expectations substantially]
Please rate your overall experience with this survey.
[choose one on scale: extremely negative negative neutral positive -extremely
positive]
Rank the following attributes in order of providing you a sense of "community": Diversity of grad
school representation, shops nearby, athletic/rec facilities, community space,
comfort/modernity of apartments, safety.
[multiple choice, ranking]
Q1. When you look back at the 2001 survey, what news did it produce, what impact did it have? Can you
atribute this impact to specific features of the survey or of the survey design process and circumstances?
Though the survey was long, the design was very simple to understand. The easy and direct questions
that needed minimal thinking and no analysis were kept perfectly at the beginning, with the slight difficult
questions towards the middle and most of all, the demographic questions towards the end making the
respondent comfortable. The survey designers keenly developed some descriptive research about current
housing and transportation. Mostly the same kind of scale was used; not confusing the students is an
effectively right method to get more appropriate answers. The 2001 survey had rating questions so that
helped to compare against myriad segments to understand more significant differences.
The overall survey response rate was only 38% of the whole graduate students of Harvard Surveys was
not visually appealing and also had errors such as irrelevant, questionable questions. The length survey
could have been reduced by eliminating the repetitive answers in the question, for example, which
transportation you often use? The options were MBTA commuter rail, subway and bus could be clubbed
to option one as MBTA. The specific students course degree affiliation questions unnecessary make the
survey lengthy which can be removed.From the 2011 survey we learned that cost, space and location
were the most important attributes to students.
Circumstances
Q2. What shoud be kept/removed in the 2005 survey? What could the survey do to contribute to the Allson
initiative in a useful way?
Current housing
Expectations from housing
Importance of housing features
About yourself
What could the survey do to contribute to the Allson initiative in a useful way?
To set not open-ended questions in ordert o create a space where consumers could voice their
aspirations.
To determine useful insights into what students value most (e.g., apartment size secondary as compared to location and
price).
Include staff as well in survey process as vision for Allston is urban, community and campus
environment.
The key to a successful survey is the compatibility between the researcher and the respondents
language and ways of thinking. Another concers which can be taken into consideration are the realism, in
terms of vocabulary used, attributes evoked, the structure (presence of an introduction, structure that matches the chronology
of the consumers experience, location of factual questions and so on, the incentivesgiven tot he respondents to complete
the survey and the last, but not least the presence of biases.
Also the ability to compare and monitor data over time and the esponse rate are making a survey successfu.
These include detail and depth of the data. Data which is collected via surveys lacks detail and depth on
the subject being researched . The responses to the surveys themselves can be a limitation as accuracy or
honesty issue may occur in the responses to the survey. The survey approach may have an advantage of
representation of the data that is produced but then as a result of this the emphasis on the responses to
be wide and inclusive limits the researchers ability to check the accuracy of the responses.