The objective of the Survey Project is to go through the whole cycle of conducting a survey. The steps are design a survey, get Human Subjects Permission, pretest the survey, deploy it finally, collect some data, analyze the data and write the report.

By the end of the six weeks, you will never look at a survey report the same way again. You will be a much more critical judge, and also appreciate the effort it takes to conduct even a simple survey.

Below, I have briefly described all the survey project proposals. I have done background work for each project, thought through the project and and made sure that it is interesting, and feasible as a six week project. I will act as the methodological consultant for all the surveys and act as a mediator between the "client" and the student groups.

Proposals

Survey 1: Relationship between attitude and behavior for telecom consumer service (Prof. Yale Braunstein, SIMS): I am interested in collecting data on the quality of customer service in two segments of the telephone industry: cellular and long distance. I have designed a one page "protocol" to gather information on how long it takes to speak to a customer service representative, whether the information provided is useful, etc. I should like to combine the results with data on perceptions and attitudes--what do customers think of customer service. Therefore, I need help with: - refining the existing protocol - developing and administering the survey on perceptions - presenting the results. This can either be one project on EITHER cellular or long distance or two projects, one on each. I have a very crude web page on the existing work at: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~bigyale/telco-care.html

My comments: This is an investigation of a classic issue in survey research: Do attitudes surveyed correlate with behavior? This question is focused towards a particular domain: telecom customer service. I see this as a meta study on survey methods. The result should give use some important insight into interpreting survey results on consumer research in general.

Methodologically, this survey will be focused towards exploring the typical attitude-behavior discrepancy. Small sample, more data from each respondent.

Survey 2: Developing standards for Power Controls of Office Equipment and Consumer Electronics (Bruce Nordman, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: Power Control Project): Would you like to influence the design of nearly every future piece of office equipment and consumer electronics? A project at Berkeley Lab aims to standardize the power controls for these devices globally, and could use your help to quantify some of the problems with existing interfaces, and help craft the design for future ones. http://eetd.LBL.gov/Controls

My comments: This project has the potential of being a very high impact one. Imagine being able to influence the interface design of power controls on all electronic equipment. The researchers are working with some key industry playes to developing a standard vocabulary for power controls of all office equipment and consumer electronics. The survey itself will be designed to get some feedback regarding some sample power control interfaces, the kind of problems people have in understanding them.

Methodologically, this survey will be designed to get feedback about a particular set of stimuli rather than general attitudes.

Survey 4: Information Overload from the IT Management's perspective: (Bob Braham, Backweb Technologies)

BackWeb Technologies, which deals with proactive communications with customers including Hewlett Packard, Cisco, NBC, and Compaq, is interested in conducting a research project in information overload from the individual's and IT management's perspective. Here are some quick facts about information overload:

• Every day more than 8 billion emails are exchanged… that number will increase to 26 billion by 2005
• By next year, it will take 4 hours a day for workers to deal with 50-plus work-related email messages
• In a 200 message/day communication environment, 71% of workers said they felt stressed by the amount of information they received each day, and 60% felt overwhelmed
• Today there are more than 2 billion Web sites on the Internet.
• A US Government study estimates that the amount of Internet traffic doubles every 100 days.

This project will evaluate how companies are handling excessive voicemails, emails, faxes that which their employees are subjected (IT management's perspective) and also how the individual employee is dealing with this onslaught of information (if employess feel that they have access to the information they need, if they feel overloaded, how much time they spend dealing with different email, mailing lists etc.)

My comments: This is a fascinating topic and very much in keeping with the SIMS worldview (read the recent report How much Information by Dean Varian & Peter Lyman). I think it is especially exciting to have two parallel surveys on the individual's and IT management's perspective.

Methodologically, the survey about of IT management will explore a number of technological alternatives, while the individual perspective one will explore the subjective feeling of informaiton overload

Survey 5: Measuring Digital Intensity: (Gil Press, EMC.com) This project can be considered an exploration of the "How much information" idea, but from the individual's perspective. The idea is to add a bit of fun and interest to the EMC.com site in a form of a survey measuring the visitors' "digital intensity" allowing them to compare themselves to other people who answered the survey. The survey will measure how much the respondent contributes to the digitization of information. Below are sample questions: How many hours you spend on...creating digital information?; How much you contribute to moving data and communicating in digital form?; and Which digitizing devices do you use.

My comments: This should be a fun project. The challenge will be in designing a survey instrument, that is fun for users to go through, while at the same time, gathering some useful information.

Methodologically, this survey will be a scale development exercise.