In the process of coming up with the research report, my group had encountered a few problems; one of it was the online survey. There were few limitations to our survey, like keeping our respondents to be Year 2 and above, who had the experience of staying on-campus or currently staying on-campus. With no response from the faculties’ in-charge in helping us to send mass email, the number of responses collected was not quite ideal. For the first 3 days, there were only 19 responses obtained.
Immediate response was to ask around for solutions from other groups, to see what they had done. My group then came up with the solution of mass emailing by using our student’s email accounts. We selected students from faculties and year of study to achieve random sampling. After I had sent the mass email out to the students, the number of responses had increased significantly. However, in the mid, there were some problems with our website. Some students feedback to me that they were not able to visit the website. Thus, I sent a second email out to the same batch of students, in response to the problem. Upon receiving too many emails from me, some of the students felt irritated. They complained about stuffs like ‘flooding their mailbox’ or ‘hoping me to take out his/her name out from the mailing list’. Regardless of all these, the online survey was still a success as it had met our target number.
In the process of doing up the report, I had gained many positive learning experiences. One of it was like dealing with the problem above. In this case, maintaining a good interpersonal relationship is very important, without the solutions given by other groups’ members; my group may not be able to meet the target of responses.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Hi Pei Pei!
My group faced such a situation during the gathering of survey responses too. We did not manage to garner enough responses through the mass mailing and had to ask our friends to help us in the survey. The process of gathering data is indeed a very good learning experience. We have to learn to deal with many situations including not having sufficient responses as you have described and the short time span we have to gather responses.
Overall, I am sure that those skills that you have learnt doing this project will be very applicable to future projects you will be involved in, be it in academic or in the workplace!
Hi Peipei!
My group's situation is slightly on the opposite end, our limitations included all NUS undergraduates, so our sampling size was actually too small. Haha.
But luckily you asked the other groups! Maybe you could have tested the link first though, before sending it out. Our group had such a trouble too, whereby the wrong link was given so that the friends we approached couldn't access the survey. Luckily it was verified quickly so that it was smooth-sailing after that.
Anyway I think those students who got irritated sure get impatient quickly, I mean, it's just two emails. =P
Yeah, even though we are different groups working on different projects, we can still help each other since we are all module-mates. That's part of building interpersonal relationships, ain't it? Luckily the kiasu-extremists are rare in our module! =P
Hey Pei Pei,
My group also faced similar problems to yours with regards to the online survey. However we chose the easier, but more expensive method. We subscribed to survey monkey and were able to access the sorting functions available from the survey website. It did cut down a lot of time as survey monkey compiled our findings all into excel spreadsheets. I guess this is usually the case; money vs. convenience.
Perhaps for future surveys, you could also consider doing what our group has done. Although some costs were incurred, the convenience obtained is quite invaluable. Time will be saved from having to compile results yourself. Frustrations can also be minimized from having to find alternative methods for sending out your surveys, like how you have done.
Cheers!
Hi Pei Pei,
Thanks for your post and for sharing the problem of trying to get enough respondents for your survey. It would have been good to cut down on the description of the problem and talk about one or two other problems encountered instead.
Anwya, I'm glad that it was a positive experience for you, especially learning how to handle interpersonal relationships :-)
Post a Comment