About
the Survey Project |
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.
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Proposals
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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.
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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.
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Survey
3: Information Overload from the Individual's perspective: (Bob Braham,
Backweb Technologies)
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
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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.
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