Achieving Quality in Organizational Surveys: A Holistic Approach

Conducting surveys with organizations, like schools, hospitals, businesses and farms, is a real challenge. There are many issues that need to be dealt with to get survey results of good quality. In every step of the design and conducting of the survey issues are involved that affect the quality of the survey outcomes. This includes e.g. defining the target population and drawing a sample, which relates to a sample frame and the sample design. Getting good data also refers to getting the data that you would want to get as a researcher, which refers to designing and developing a measuring instrument, the questionnaire. Another challenge is actually getting response, which relates to communicating the survey to the sampled units, and conducting the fieldwork. In this paper an overview of issues affecting quality in organizational surveys will be presented. In order to do so, the process-quality approach to survey design as discussed by (Snijkers et al. Designing and conducting business surveys. Wiley, Hoboken, 2013) is applied. This approach involves identifying the steps in the survey process, and for each step identifying the resulting survey components and their quality considerations. Apart from this process-quality approach, this paper discusses tailoring and project planning as two other basic survey design approaches in order to get good survey data. With regard to tailoring: three basic tailoring considerations are discussed. All steps and sub-processes, as well as people, resources, and money need to be planned to achieve the targeted survey objectives. These three approaches are integrated in a survey process map, which will be discussed in detail, relating survey components and error sources to each step. Thus an extended Total Survey Error framework is provided, offering a holistic process-quality framework for surveyors who want to conduct an organizational survey. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on survey quality: quality is not achieved by itself; it needs to be planned in and considered at all stages in the survey process!