It’s clear that after school programs, especially as they relate to tutoring and learning, are an important part of the K through 12 educational system. That’s why it’s somewhat unusual that these programs don’t undergo the same amount of research as normal school hours.

Start Researching Your After School Care

You can never stop improving your school. The more you pay attention to every aspect of the program, the more you can ensure that the students are well prepared when they move forward. Your after school care plays a significant role in this. That’s why you should initiate performance metrics, to ensure that these programs are working effectively.

Some of these are going to be behind the scenes. You should see if any students show improvement, and whether those in after school programs are effectively continuing their education beyond those students that parents choose not to enroll. It’ll also help you spot any inefficiencies, and determine if there are any areas that you can improve or alter to meet student needs.

You should also be checking with the children and parents themselves. Make sure that these students feel supported, and that their educational needs are being met. While not all children can tell you objectively whether or not they’re happy with an afterschool program, they can give you valuable information about whether your programs are achieving their goals.

Great Schools Research Everything

Every single program within your institution matters. From the top to the bottom – from science and math to gym class to after school soccer – each one plays a role in how successful your children will be after they leave the school’s care. The organizations that have the most success with their graduates are the ones that research every component of their educational strategy and ensure that the students are getting exactly what they require to achieve great things. After school programs play are a part of that, and should be added to any research campaign.

Parents often need to know more about what happens in a school in order to make sure their children are getting the best education possible. But teachers may also need to know what’s happening outside of school in order to make sure that the student’s educational needs are being met.

Teachers need to know that students are spending time on their homework. They need to know that parents are teaching their children the value of education. They need to know that students are spending time on healthy activities, and that they are getting help from outside sources when necessary. Teachers also need to know whether parents have the knowledge and abilities to help the students when they’ve left the classroom.

Bridging Parents and Teachers

Evaluating a child’s home life is often as important as evaluating your own educational system. Parents have the right to allow their child to live as they want, but sometimes the parents are unaware or unable to help their child more, and the more you know about their home life the more you can ensure that there are programs in place to help children get what they need.

For example, technology has changed considerably in the last 20 years. Children these days are far more technologically advanced than their parents were at the same age. There are aspects of technology that children may need help with, but their parents may be completely unable to provide them with that help.

This is also an issue for the basic classes, like math and science. If a child needs help, the first place they turn is their parents. But if a parent doesn’t know how to help their child with that particular subject, then the child is not getting the support they need.

This problem can extend further. If a classroom of students is finding that they are in need of extra help, and parents are allowing their children to watch television or are not helping them with their homework, then it may be time to institute some type of additional assistance within the classroom. Further, if many parents work for a significant amount of time after class and the child is often left alone, then the school may need to create more after school activities to help both parents and children occupy their time.

There are many reasons that understanding a child’s home life is important for understanding how your school can help the child succeed. It may not be feasible to force these parents (or these children) into any program, but you may find that a program needs to be created and learn what you can do to draw parents in.

Meeting Student Needs Like a Business

As an educational institution, you need to look at your school like a business – the business of training students to succeed as they move up the levels of learning. And like any business, you need to understand how to make sure that you’re creating the best product out there. By researching student life outside of the classroom, you can improve your ability to make sure that by the time these students leave your school, you’ve done everything you can to make sure they’re as ready for higher education as they can be.

While the PTA is technically dedicated to parental participation, they’re also designed to make sure that the school itself is actively being run in a way that is best for students. Both parents and teachers see two sides of a child’s life. Parents see how the child does at home with their homework, happiness, and general personality. Teachers see how a student does in the classroom. Both of these roles are crucial in recognizing what’s best for the child.

PTA Meeting Organization

One of the problems with most PTA meetings, however, is that despite all of the rules and meeting strategies, there are still plenty of ways to improve organization. The typical PTA comes up with several random ideas to discuss on the agenda. While some of these ideas have outside sources, many of the contributions come from a select few people.

Even when put to a vote, these organizations often do so in a way that is not ideal for generating valuable feedback and honest results. Many of them ask questions in public, and not everyone on the PTA is going to stand up for what they believe in or act.

Why This is a Problem

PTA meetings are, in many ways, exactly like most types of survey research or polling. You ask questions to the groups, discuss strategies, and ultimately vote on what you think is best.

But the problem is that everything is done in public, and in a way where each person doesn’t receive equal amounts of time to discuss their thoughts or beliefs. You need everyone in a PTA group to be able to speak their mind, provide their opinion, and cast their votes. You need them all to do so without fear of being judged or concern over the validity of their opinion.

You simply can’t do that when you’re running these meetings in public in a way that doesn’t involve every single person in the PTA. You need people to act and vote based on what they think is best, not what they’re willing to do when other people’s eyes are on them.

Survey software can help you tackle this issue. Here are several of the ways that utilizing this software can vastly improve the success of the PTA and the success of your children:

• Run a survey before each meeting. In the survey, ask qualitative and quantitative questions about what should be on the agenda. Discuss all sorts of topics, leave room for further discussion, and view everyone’s answer anonymously. You may even want to poll those not in the PTA to see if they have anything they feel needs to be discussed, because great ideas can come from any source – not just those that have decided to play a role in PTA meetings.
• At the meeting, start discussing the topics that you discovered during your initial survey. Don’t vote right there. Let everyone that wants to speak their piece speak. Not everyone will, but that’s not necessarily something that you can control. Don’t worry about voting on these topics yet, but you can decide to let people take notes if they need to about each topic.
• Once the meeting is over, send a survey to each person at the PTA meeting with the questions that were brought up for discussion, allowing them to vote on each one. This way they can vote anonymously without being judged by others. Make sure that they know the issue is anonymous.
• Once completed, you can publish the results online. The Survey Methods software has a very helpful online feature that will show people the results of the survey via online link. You can also discuss the results at the next meeting.

While this may seem like a lot of extra work, the reality is that it will actually save a considerable amount of time and be much more fair to voters. Meetings themselves will become far more organized and to the point. Voting will take place behind closed doors (allowing you to cut voting time from the meeting and ensure that voting is not public in a way that could influence the votes of others).

Right now, the goal of your PTA meetings is to make sure that the students have the best possible education available. Your organization needs to maximize the way it addresses and responds to needs in order for that to be possible. Survey tools can help you with this. Give us a call today to find out more.

Apartment managers represent an example of an unsupervised manager. Rarely do tenants know the names or contact information of the ownership. There is only the apartment manager, often with no oversight at all, running all of the apartment complexes.

Managing Apartments and The Value of Oversight

Property ownership is a business like any other, and apartment managers are the only face of your business. You need to hire the best manager, and make sure they’re doing everything they can to keep tenants happy and interested in staying with the property. This isn’t possible if there is no oversight, because the only way to know if the manager is doing their job is to know the status of the tenants, including their satisfaction level with both the apartments and the manager.

Yet very few apartment complexes or property management companies do anything to oversee the effectiveness of the manager. Their contact information is rarely available, so any inappropriate or unprofessional conduct on the part of the manager goes unreported. This represents a serious flaw in the property ownership business model, and it provides too much power and job security to a position that may not be pulling its weight.

The Solution to Evaluating Unsupervised Management

With property ownership, the tenants are the customers. As long as the customers are making your company money (ie, paying rent without ruining the property), then they need to be treated like valued customers.

Like any customers, gauging their satisfaction is important. Property owners, not managers, should do this regularly, to ensure that the apartment complex’s needs are being met, the manager is doing their job professionally, etc. The worse an apartment complex is, the more bad press it will receive and the more tenants it will lose.

There are several different ways that you can consider running this type of survey. We will explore two of the available options in the next article.

There are numerous reasons that companies may perform brand research, and these companies are all trying to learn more about the market – and their company’s role in it. When companies perform brand research, they’re often looking for answers to the following types of information.

• Brand Association

Most companies try to understand what emotions or thoughts the consumer has with your brand. These include trust, value, positive/negative associations, and more. Brand association is important – especially with established companies. But it’s even useful for new companies, because you can see how things like company name, logo, and more, create the listed emotions.

• Brand Strengths/Weaknesses

A similar, and related aspect of brand research is discovering the current strengths and weaknesses of your brand. This information can help you learn what areas you can exploit and/or minimize in order to increase purchases. It’s a great way to “stop the bleeding” if a weakness is hurting your revenue, or if there is a strength that clearly resonates with the market, it’s a good idea to know.

• Brand Choice

You can use your brand research to understand why people choose your brand over the competition (or don’t choose your brand, as the case may be). You can see what differences you have in markets and understand if your brand strengths are due to your own marketing, or if they’re due to competitor error.

• Brand Messaging and Product Choice

It’s also possible to learn about whether or not the future choices your company makes and/or the future products you decide to release under that brand fit with how your brand is currently viewed by the public. A message or product that doesn’t match how you’ve marketed the brand are less likely to succeed or may alter the brand image.

Brand research is an important part of improving your business’s place in the market and remaining a positive force in the industry. The above list represents the most common reasons that companies just like yours perform brand research.

Additional Benefits

• Reducing Habituation/Central Tendency Problems

Another significant issue that affects many researchers is habituation, and to a lesser extent central tendency. Both of these occur when a respondent is either bored with a survey or has answered enough questions that they start to give half-hearted answers that may not accurately reflect their thoughts. It’s a significant problem with survey data.

Question randomization reduces this problem to some extent. While it cannot necessarily stop central tendency or habituation, it can ensure that all questions are subjected to these problems relatively equally, by placing questions in different locations in the survey. This should, in essence, average out the effects of habituation and central tendency and hopefully lead to more analyzable data.

• Shortening Surveys

Finally, question randomizers can be used to make a survey shorter. Sometimes researchers find that they simply have too many questions in their survey. Rather than cut those questions out, they can target their survey to a much larger sample and then randomize which questions are shown to the respondents. Not all question blocks will be shown at any given time, thus making the survey much shorter while still including all of the questions for analysis.

Your sample will have to be much larger to account for all of the respondents that will not be receiving the questions each time, but it can be an interesting way to collect a great deal of data at a single time period and compare against other data without necessarily cutting back the true length of your survey.

Using Question Randomizers

These are just a few of the benefits of question randomization. Short surveys with easy to understand questions may not benefit quite as much from the benefits listed above, but overall there are many reasons question randomizers can be used to improve your data.

Question randomizers may not be ideal for every type of survey or every research study, but for those that can use them they have a great deal of potential to help you improve your survey data and account for some of the issues that often lead to incorrect or bias survey results.

Question randomizers are another tool that researchers use to enhance the quality of their survey design. As they name describes, question randomizers use a randomization algorithm to have a question appear at a random interval to the respondent. Sometimes randomizers may be used to display blocks of questions, while other times these randomizers may be used to randomize each and every question in the survey. Question randomization can have several uses that make it valuable to researchers, and while not every survey can have random questions, it is something important to consider.

Benefits of Question Randomizers for Your Surveys

• Reducing Biases

Researchers like to believe that each question in a survey is independent of the other, but the truth is that where a question displays in a survey can have a fairly significant effect on how someone answers another question. For example, if one question asks “what do you think of feature X” and the next question asks “what do you think of feature Y” the respondent may rate Y lower or higher based on how they feel about feature X, but that doesn’t mean that independently they would have rated the feature at the same score.

There are ample ways that a previous question can have an effect on the results of a future question, and that affects the quality of your data. Randomizing the question is a valuable solution, because your question will be placed all throughout your survey – sometimes in the beginning, sometimes in the end, sometimes in the middle. Ideally, this randomization will average out the effects of these biases, giving you more accurate data. Some software platforms will also allow you to compare and contrast survey answers based on where they ended up, which can help you discover if there was a question bias as well, although small sample size limits may apply.

We’ll look at the other two benefits of survey question randomization in the next article.

But that is not their only uses. Question randomization is also a great tool for question testing.

How to Use Randomization for Testing Survey Questions

Your data is only as good as your survey. If your survey isn’t measuring what you think it’s measuring, then you’re not receiving any useful results. So it’s often in a researcher’s best interests to essentially test their survey. You can do this with question randomization.

Randomizing Order

Order has an effect on your survey, but ideally you want to have the questions in an order that makes sense. If you’re curious whether or not your survey order is having an effect on your results, you can keep one survey static and run a simultaneous survey with the questions randomized and see if the results are any different.

Randomizing Blocks

Another method you can try is randomizing blocks of questions, where the blocks themselves have something in common that you’re trying to test. A great example is question wording. It’s possible that you are unsure if the wording of your question is providing you with the right answers. You can then create two separate blocks of questions, each with the different wording, and run them together.

Respondents will not be subjected to both blocks. Rather, they’ll be subjected to a single block, and you can compare the results of the one block against the results of the other. This will help you see if there are any issues that arise from the wording, as well as see if dropout rate increases at the chosen questions.

Survey Changes

Finally, you can also test your survey changes using question randomization, using the blocks example above. Any time you change a survey – even a single word – you may be changing the way your survey is responded to. With randomization you can run the old survey and the new survey simultaneously, and see if the results are different, how, and what you can do to account for future survey results.

These are a few of the ways that survey question randomization can help you test your survey, while still running a survey at the same time.

How to Control for Dropout Rate

• Limiting Questions

The first method is to randomize which questions from a larger pool show in a shorter survey. For example, if you have 35 questions but you notice that there is a high dropout rate right around 15 questions, you can “cut” your survey down to 15 questions, and simply randomize which of the 35 will show at any given time. You’ll need a much larger sample, but eventually you’ll be giving out shorter surveys to customers while still having them answer, as a whole, a much larger dataset.

• Collecting Data Anyway

Imagine you have a survey with a 100% dropout rate after 15 questions, but you have 100 questions overall and you refuse to cut it down. In other words, every respondent will drop out before reaching the end of your survey. A less than ethical way of still receiving answers is to your questions is to randomize all of them. The users will see different questions for the first 15, you’ll still collect data, but the users won’t be finishing the survey.

This can be used no matter your dropout rate, as a way of increasing the size of your sample for each question even if the users drop out.

• Testing Dropout Rate

Finally, you can also see if question order is what creates the dropout rate in the first place. Imagine you are not randomizing questions and you notice that people are dropping off at about question 15 on average. While you may believe it’s because your survey is too long, the truth is that it may be that questions 14 or 15 are too tough, personal, or otherwise hard to answer. Randomizing it allows you to test why dropout rate is occurring, which in turn can help you control it.

All of these are ways that randomizing the questions in your survey can help you control dropout rate and, ultimately, negate it altogether.

Discussion

Both traditional research and market research can benefit from a discussion section to the report. The discussion section helps anyone that reads the report really understand it, because it focuses on all of the things that the data “means” to the company. In the discussion section you can go over what the results mean for the future of your company and whether they are encouraging or not. You can explain whether you believe the data to be representative, or explain if you don’t. You can also discuss future research, including research that is going to spawn from there and research that is going to be repeated in the future (as is the case with customer satisfaction).

Much of this depends on the type of study, of course. If this was a study of employee satisfaction, for example, it would be a good idea to emphasize what you are hearing from the employees, what you are going to do to make them more satisfied, etc. If it’s a discussion of customer buying habits, then perhaps you can explain what you believe effects these habits and where your research will take you to discover the accuracy of your statement.

Conclusion

Finally, you can end with a conclusion, summarizing the paper so that anyone reading it can simply skip to the bottom to understand what the purpose of the paper was and where you’re taking it.

Final Thoughts

Your survey report should also be well formatted and attractive, because it is an extension of your company. Good formatting helps to ensure that the paper looks interesting and is valued, instead of cheaply put together.

Survey reports are more valuable than people realize, and companies can use them for a variety of purposes. They can and should often be distributed to employees so that everyone can see what the company has discovered in their research. They can be saved and handed out to partners or investors, or they can even be provided to customers. Some companies use these reports as incentives to customers for filling out the survey.

Regardless, creating an easy to read and understand survey report is valuable for a variety of reasons. Analyzing data and drawing conclusions is important, but your company will often need to show others the results of their surveys either now or in the future, and a report provides an easy to understand way of disseminating that information.