There’s a lot of good information here as-is, so I don’t want to sound like I’m just finding fault; but if you do future surveys (and I hope you do) all of the questions could be more tightly written. The response choices should represent discrete positions with as little overlap as possible. If you can minimize ambiguity in the questions your results will be much more powerful and easier to analyze.

Also you might reconsider allowing people to check off multiple responses. Some topics are difficult to choose only one answer. In those cases you might want to allow people to check off their top two or three answers. If you leave it open-ended you are always going to get people who check off all, or most, choices. When that happens it dilutes the overall quality of the responses.

Good questionnaires are tough to write. It’s different from interviewing people where you want some flexibility to drive a discussion. With questionnaires you want answers to be as binary as possible. But you have to provide enough choices so most people can find a response that matches how they feel. People get uncomfortable if they feel they are getting boxed into “for it” or “against it” responses. You need to find the middle ground without allowing too many shades of gray. If you can stick to 4-5 well-reasoned responses you stand a good chance of getting decent results.

It might help to cultivate some test subjects within the target audience whom you can trust to give you honest feedback on the questionnaire.

All-in-all I think you did a nice job on this survey. Good stuff.

I think I made a mistake on the first question and they were allowed to answer multiple times.

That’s a pretty good sampling, but how did you tabulate the responses? Many of the answers are more (sometimes way more) than cumulative. Was this a “check all that apply” kind of questionnaire? That’s fine, some of the questions lend themselves to more than one answer. But I think you need to clarify that, otherwise the historgram charts are somewhat misleading. It’s a reasonable measure of attitudes, but you can’t really legitimately conclude that any single marketing approach is most popular since the respondents may have answered multiple times for some questions. I don’t think that invalidates what you’ve done, it just deserves clarification.

Question 1 “How would you categorize the size of your company/publication?” responses are a little strange. You got 174 answers from 171 people. The only rational explanation I can think of is some people (3 specifically) answered the question for both their company and publication (e.g. you might work for a publishing company that is the biggest in the industry, but your specific publication is a small national book). Is that correct? Schizophrenia is really the only other explanation I can think of.

Interesting information as always though, despite the pond getting in the way of the statistics.

Thank you,
Andy.

This is very helpful though…

I have a quick question for you and I’m sorry to be nit-picky. But I just downloaded the PDF with just the AB information and I am slightly confused by the data. In all the questions the “Answered Question” response totals are all 77 however if you tally the number of people who answered the individual categories then the response totals don’t always equal 77 implying that people were able to “tick” multiple categories in each question.

Take for example the last question:

What do you think is the best way to find new talent?
There are 18 possible answers or categories.
Total “Answered Question” at the bottom equals 77
However if you tally all the response counts for each category then they equal 356

I’m no mathematician, but I would deduce from this that respondents were able to answer each question multiple times and I would just be interested to learn how this affects the information contained in the data.