Update in 2024: Back in 2014, the European Bionformatics Institue (EMBL-EBI) asked me to do Survey Training for their staff – mainly research scientists and computer specialists working on the complex bioinformatics tools that they create and make available for free to other researchers.
I was glad that Jane Matthews joined me for the training as we used examples provided by the participants, and together we enjoyed puzzling through the needs of bioinformatics researchers in their survey designs. I recall clearly that the participants were lovely and were glad to compare their experiences in a very technical scientific arena with ours from different worlds.
My 2014 survey process had five steps
You’ll see that at that time, my survey process only had five steps:
- Goals
- Users
- Questions
- Deploy
- Analyse
We learned a lot from comparing what we all thought we wanted to change in the surveys with the topics that are covered in these slides.
I was thinking a lot about Total Survey Error
I was still deep into writing my book, and primarily coming to understand that I needed to rethink my approach around Total Survey Error, which I had learned about through reading Survey Errors and Survey Costs by Robert M. Groves, and then learned some more from the textbook Survey methodology by Robert M. Groves, Floyd J. Fowler Jr, Mick P. Couper, James M. Lepkowski, Eleanor Singer, and Roger Tourangeau.
The concept of Total Survey Error brings together all the many things that can go wrong when doing surveys, and encourages us to think about all the errors in context with each other rather than (for example) fixating on sampling error.
Later in 2014, I started to bring Total Survey Error into my workshops. Its first outing was at a workshop Six crucial survey concepts that UX professionals need to know
Jane and I kept working on our training for EMBL-EBI, and by the time we next posted our slides for survey training for EMBL-EBI in 2017, you’ll see that we had seven steps in the survey process – and the Survey Octopus – which is my interpretation of Total Survey Error
These slides reflect our teaching in 2014
We have kept these slides here in case you would like to go back to see where we were in 2014.