The Five Cs of Survey Design

Surveys are a powerful means for gaining a better understanding of stakeholder sentiments and how they are feeling about their experiences. At the same time, the effectiveness of surveys are directly tied to the level of effort and expertise behind their design. Some of the most important characteristics of effective surveys can be broken down into the ‘five Cs.’

Clear
Clarity is key and provides multiple services. It serves the respondents by allowing them to straightforwardly digest the questions and provide their feedback. It serves the project by maximizing the prospect of stakeholders completing the survey in full, and it serves the research team in terms of enhancing their reputation as skillful and practical professionals.

Concise
Conciseness is both the in-house cousin of clarity and its true companion. Surely, you can be clear without being concise, and vice versa, so marrying them together means survey participants can focus less time on reading and more time on responding. This helps ensure that respondents feel a sense of pace and progress as they complete the survey.

Competence
Before you even get to the stage of launching a survey, it is crucial for researchers to ‘check the box’ of making sure the survey will only go out to those with the understanding and background to be competent respondents. Anything less than this will bring chaos to your results and pose big problems to your analysis and reporting. Fidelity to this standard may mean more time upfront, but it pays off in your ability to stand ten toes behind the data when all is said and done.

Consistency
It is important for survey respondents to feel a sense of order and rhythm in how the questions are arranged. This element is crucial for ensuring that participants can progress through the survey without moments of confusion or having to think too much beyond simply responding to the question at hand. On a related note, the best surveys are designed around finding central truths about social reality, and this requires aligning questions to established theories on matters important to organizations. The point is linking responses to your survey to established findings, which demonstrates that your survey results will tell you something significant about your organization's current state. Consistency in question arrangement and in how your survey results align with established findings are critical components of distinguished surveys.

Context-aware
One of the primary dividing lines between conventional and superior surveys is the fact that the latter are designed with context awareness built-in. Most surveys are a collection of individual questions that analysts and those in need of the data are forced to make sense of on the back-end. Superior surveys are designed from a respondent-centric standpoint, seeing each one as a person with characteristics and attributes that may impact their responses. Additionally, context awareness comes into play from the standpoint of maximizing the analytical power of the survey. This means designing survey questions in a way that meets the standards required for conducting advanced statistical analyses.

As a research professional, I cannot help but pause sometimes when I make note of the overall scale of surveys and questionnaires, and the middling quality of so many of them. It’s almost as if organizations are deploying surveys mindlessly just because they know that they “do something.” That said, the five Cs listed above are a good start to righting the ship. Your organization deserves survey instruments that are created mindfully, professionally, and effectively. Get out of the rout of routine. Gain the game-changing insights.