| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Off topic: Why do we hate questionnaires? Thread poster: Joanna Gough
|
|---|
| Not just yours | Jul 29, 2010 |
askaska wrote:
Please note that I also have a question about how long the respondents have been working as translators which gives me a much better understanding of their profile than age alone....etc
Indeed, age plus length of sentence in solitary confinement should prob'ly be taken together. Anyway, the point was not to pick holes in your survey (else I would also have mentioned the labels used on some of the scales).
The point was that all surveys (thus inlcuding yours) show some kind of flaw that makes me wonder either how much the researcher really knows about what we do, or how much time they took compiling it. (FWIW, I thought your actual questions were quite well put together, altho they seemed to shy away from the nitty gritty of the question).
Admittedly, yours has been the least bad I've seen for a goodly while. I wonder whether the legendary pickiness of (decent) translators is not part of the issue? If the survey is not perfect, is the whole thing rejected out of hand by vast numbers of people...?
(Edit to remove a remark which, upon reflection, may indicate I had entirely missed the point of one of the surveys )
[Edited at 2010-07-29 10:56 GMT]
| | | | | criticism taken | Jul 29, 2010 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
With your post title you managed to grab the attention of 164 people in one day, but with the rest of your post you managed to make 99% of them lose interest in your survey. Don't blame the public for your own failure to capture and retain a more meaningful percentage of readers.
Here's a question for you: how many people who started the survey actually completed it? In other words, on which page in your survey do you lose most people? I assume you have statistics about how many people visited each page of the survey... you do, don't you?
Samuel,
Thank you for your valuable comments and I accept your criticism. I would however say that had you pressed the comment button when you read the post and mentioned your points then, your comment would have been constructive. They way you did it now is rather destructive.
My completion rate is at 75%, but this includes quite a few first, piloting questionnaires which I will clear at the end. I have had 136 completed questionnaires so far and I would like to thank everyone for their time and support, and indeed, their criticism.
Best wishes,
Joanna
| | | | Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 07:07
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Why would I have mentioned it? | Jul 29, 2010 |
askaska wrote:
Thank you for your valuable comments and I accept your criticism. I would however say that had you pressed the comment button when you read the post and mentioned your points then, your comment would have been constructive.
Why would I have mentioned it there? You did not ask for criticism in that post, so any criticism there would have been off-topic and possibly even rude, don't you agree?
They way you did it now is rather destructive.
None of my comments in the previous response was in any way insulting or belittling, so I'm not sure why you regard it as destructive. You weren't fishing for compliments, after all. (-:
My completion rate is at 75%, but this includes quite a few first, piloting questionnaires which I will clear at the end.
I don't understand what you're saying here -- could you explain, please? What do you mean your "completion rate is 75%"? 75% of what? Completion of what?
| | | | | a few points to add and clarify | Jul 29, 2010 |
Samuel Murray wrote:
I don't understand what you're saying here -- could you explain, please? What do you mean your "completion rate is 75%"? 75% of what? Completion of what?
I mean 75% of people who started the questionnaire have succesfully completed it. It has actually gone up to 75,5 % and my count of completed questionnaires is now 142.
I just want to add that I'm not a professional questionnaire developer, but a student. We are encouraged to carry out research in this way and I have given a lot of attention to ensure the questionnaire ticked all the boxes, according to the 'book'. I think given that 2 senior tutors, a number of colleagues and two senior people from the industry have approved it I had every right to assume it was of a good quality. One can only do so much...
But the point I was making, which has not been addresses by anyone yet, was that even professional questionnaires, eg. from TAUS or Common Sense Advisory don't get high numbers either and I was just wondering why.
This thread was not intended to be about my questionnaire but about questionnaires in general, however I am grateful for all your feedback.
Samuel, I think it is not the place for battle of words, however witty they might be. Let's not pick holes in the whole thing but come back to my original point.
The lack of research can hold us back, like in the case of our reliance on crude oil, which I mentioned in my original post.
If students are encouraged to do research then, however imperfect, lacking in depth or accuracy it might be, they still try to do their best and perhaps deserve a little credit. I'm not thinking about myself, but about all students who are in the same predicament. Of course we don't know as much as you do about the industry and perhaps sometimes we are not given enough time to complete our dissertations. 2,5 months is not nearly enough time to get insight into all the nooks and crannies of the area researched. But this is precisely why we ask you, our more experienced colleagues ues to help us.
I must say that overall I have received a lot of help and encouraging comments, and of course one cannot please everyone. However, my point in the whole debate is that on the whole, still only a very small percentage of translators are getting involved.
Best wishes,
Joanna
| | |
|
|
|
Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 07:07
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| More comments | Jul 29, 2010 |
askaska wrote:
I mean 75% of people who started the questionnaire have succesfully completed it. It has actually gone up to 75,5 % and my count of completed questionnaires is now 142.
If 75% of people who start filling out your questionnaire end up completing it, then I think you have much to be proud of. It means your questionnaire is pretty good.
I think given that 2 senior tutors, a number of colleagues and two senior people from the industry have approved it I had every right to assume it was of a good quality. One can only do so much...
I agree, and I think you've done well. The point in my initial response was that you may have lost a large proportion of your potential respondents not because of the questionnaire's design itself but because of factors preceding it (such as the way you posted your message).
But the point I was making, which has not been addresses by anyone yet, was that even professional questionnaires, eg. from TAUS or Common Sense Advisory don't get high numbers either and I was just wondering why.
Well, I'm not sure, but there are some percentages that apply to public response in general. For example, people who do direct marketing (i.e. selling stuff via postage or mail) believe that a response rate of 2% (yes, a mere two percent) of a targeted group is quite an average response, so if you get more than 2% response, you can actually be quite satisfied.
I also suspect that some of the surveying companies specifically limit the number of respondents, or narrow down the avenues by which respondents are found, so that their low response figures aren't something to be worried about. After all, at a certain threshold there is sufficient data to draw conclusions, so why gather more data beyond that point? For a student, however, I think the principle is "the more responses, the better".
By the way, your initial post with the survey link got 325 views so far. If you had 142 completed surveys from that many views, then it means your response rate is 43%, which is quite high (I'm assuming the 142 is from the ProZ.com post only).
Did you advertise your questionnaire on other translator forums and translation mailing lists as well? Forum rules here prohibit me from telling you the names of some, but here are a few you can have a look at (some of them have forums where you can also post your message):
http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Business_Services/Communications/Translation/Resources/
http://www.dmoz.org/Business/Business_Services/Communications/Translation/Employment/
| | | | | Sloppy survey techniques | Jul 29, 2010 |
askaska wrote (yesterday):
The 40 mark was mainly set to indicate whether the respondents have 'been there' before CAT Tools, but I have now added an option to indicate whether they belong to the more mature groups, 51-60 and 60+.
askaska wrote (today):
my count of completed questionnaires is now 142.
142 responses in one day isn't bad. You did dump all the responses from before you last changed the survey right? If you didn't, you are now mixing data from two different surveys which is a no-no. It's also a clue as to why people who do understand such things can't be bothered to answer surveys.
| | | | | Thank you for your explanation | Jul 29, 2010 |
Thanks for your good explanation, askaska.
I must admit, seeing the title of your survey, as I don't know what Web 2.0 means, I would have felt that I was in no position to answer it. It is very hard to keep up with the jargon.
| | | |
Samuel,
You have spent so much time commenting this thread - I really appreciate your involvement.
Yes, perhaps I should have spent a bit more time on the front matter. I've just looked at it again and it is too late to ament it. By the way, I did mention that comments and questions are welcomed:)
I have posted the questionnaire all over the place and the distribution has grown organically, with people putting it on their websites, blogs and twitter, whi... See more Samuel,
You have spent so much time commenting this thread - I really appreciate your involvement.
Yes, perhaps I should have spent a bit more time on the front matter. I've just looked at it again and it is too late to ament it. By the way, I did mention that comments and questions are welcomed:)
I have posted the questionnaire all over the place and the distribution has grown organically, with people putting it on their websites, blogs and twitter, which is very encouraging. I was also given a page on a website dedicated to training translators, but perhaps I should too avoid names due to forum rules. Another well known organization helped too and it went through their mailing. It must have reached thousands, so perhaps the 2% rule applies:))
Thank you so much for the links, I'll definitely explore some of the internal links.
Best wishes,
Joanna
[Edited at 2010-07-29 17:10 GMT]
[Edited at 2010-07-29 17:13 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | |
|
|
|
Lesley Clarke wrote:
I must admit, seeing the title of your survey, as I don't know what Web 2.0 means, I would have felt that I was in no position to answer it. It is very hard to keep up with the jargon.
Lesley,
Yes, you are absolutely right - keeping up is so hard these days - everything changes so fast, the lingo too...
As for web 2.0, I made an assumption that since I'm doing an on-line questionnaire mostly through forums etc, people would be familiar with this term. I admit it is a wide umbrella term and people can be using the technology without being familiar with the term itself. It is encouraging, however to see that only a small percentage of respondents have not heard the term before - and therefore I decided to keep it.
In the simplest words web 2.0 relates to what we are doing now - communicating through the internet. Websites from the previous 'era' now labelled web 1.0 did not have these two-way features whcih enable communication, participation, sharing etc. Blogs, forums, social media like facebook, interactive websites with user-generated content like youtube are all examples of web 2.0 applications.
In the context of translation it relates to open translation platforms, collaborative translation, community translation, crowdsourcing etc. The implications of these trends for professional translators are enormous and this is why I decided to write my dissertation about it.
Also, this is why I need you to tell me what you think about all these developments - or if you don't know about them I'd like to know too:))
Best wishes,
Joanna
[Edited at 2010-07-29 19:45 GMT]
| | | | | mixing data from two questionnaires | Jul 29, 2010 |
142 responses in one day isn't bad. You did dump all the responses from before you last changed the survey right? If you didn't, you are now mixing data from two different surveys which is a no-no. It's also a clue as to why people who do understand such things can't be bothered to answer surveys.
Terry,
142 responses alltogether! It would be terrific to get so many in one day!)
Thank you fo raising concern about data mixing and I understand that this is not an acceptable practice.
However, it doesn't really apply to me as I did not change my survey. I just added a comment box to the age question so that respondents can indicate if they belong to the 51-60 or 60+ groups. I will analyse the questionnaire with all my original questions, but the data from this particular comment box will give me extra information regarding the age of the respondents and I can trace each one of them and see how they responded to my questions. Hope this helps.
Best wishes,
Joanna
| | | | Lincoln Hui
Hong Kong
Local time: 13:07
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
| I love questionnaires... | Feb 20, 2021 |
...as work. But the more I work on them, the less interested I am in answering them, and the more conscious I become about questionnaires that are not well-designed or thought out.
| | | | Andy Watkinson
Spain
Local time: 07:07
Member
Catalan to English
+ ...
Lincoln Hui wrote:
...as work. But the more I work on them, the less interested I am in answering them, and the more conscious I become about questionnaires that are not well-designed or thought out.
I'm sure we're all more than relieved to know that you're "conscious"....it's removed at least one of our concerns about your wellbeing.
Anything to add?
Perhaps you'd care to comment on the circumstances surrounding the assassination of JFK.....
Because you obviously specialise in "unknown unknowns", such as why you're attempting to be a prime candidate for PITA of the year...
Any enlightenment in that regard?
| | | | | Pages in topic: < [1 2] | To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator: You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request » Why do we hate questionnaires? | Trados Business Manager Lite | Create customer quotes and invoices from within Trados Studio
Trados Business Manager Lite helps to simplify and speed up some of the daily tasks, such as invoicing and reporting, associated with running your freelance translation business.
More info » |
| | Wordfast Pro | Translation Memory Software for Any Platform
Exclusive discount for ProZ.com users!
Save over 13% when purchasing Wordfast Pro through ProZ.com. Wordfast is the world's #1 provider of platform-independent Translation Memory software. Consistently ranked the most user-friendly and highest value
Buy now! » |
|
| | | | X Sign in to your ProZ.com account... | | | | | |
Login to reply/comment 
