Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Notice that in the responses, youve got some percentages (71%, 18%) and some raw numbers (852, 216).
The percentages are just thatthe percent of people who gave a particular answer. Put another way, the
percentages represent the number of people who gave each answer as a proportion of the number of people who
answered the question.
So, 71% of your survey respondents (852 of the 1,200 surveyed) plan on coming back next year.
This table also shows you that 18% say they are planning to return and 11% say they are not sure.
The raw numbers are the number of individual survey respondents who gave each answer. So 852 people said,
Yes, Im coming back next year!
If you assume that most of the people who said yesand maybe some of those who said they were not sureare
coming next year, you can build a forecasting model to estimate the number of people* who will attend next
years conference.
*You can determine this number with more confidence if you had a very high participation rate, meaning most
of the people who attended the conference and received your survey filled it out.
From this table you see that a large majority of the students (86%) and teachers (80%) plan to come back next
year. However, the administrators who attended your conference look different, with under half (46%) of them
intending to come back! Hopefully, some of our other questions will help you figure out why this is the case and
what you can do to improve the conference for administrators so more of them will return year after year.
Using a filter is another useful tool for analyzing data. Filtering means narrowing your focus to one particular
subgroup, and filtering out the others. So instead of comparing subgroups to one another, here were just looking
at how one subgroup answered the question.
For instance, you could limit your focus to just women, or just men, then re-run the crosstab by type of attendee to
compare female administrators, female teachers, and female students. One thing to be wary of as you slice and
dice your results: Every time you apply a filter or cross tab, your sample size decreases. Ti make sure your results
are statistically significant, it may be helpful to use a sample size calculator.
Say you asked your survey respondents how many of the 10 available sessions they attended over the course of
the conference. And your results look like this:
You might want to analyze the average. As you may recall, there are three different kinds of averages: mean,
median and mode.
In the table above, the average number of sessions attended is 6.3. The average reported here is the mean, the kind
of average thats probably most familiar to you. To determine the mean you add up the data and divide that by the
number of figures you added. In this example, you have 10 people saying they attended one session, 50 people for
four sessions, 100 people for five sessions, etc. So, you multiply all of these pairs together, sum them up, and
divide by the total number of people.
The median is another kind of average. The median is the middle value, the 50% mark. In the table above, we
would locate the number of sessions where 500 people were to the left of the number and 500 to the right. The
median is, in this case, 7 sessions. This can help you eliminate the influence of outliers, which may adversely
affect your data.
The last kind of average is mode. The mode is the most frequent response. In this case the answer is six. 260
survey participants attended 6 sessions, more than attended any other number of sessions.
Meansand other types of averagescan also be used if your results were based on Likert scales.
Drawing conclusions
When it comes to reporting on survey results, think about the story the data tells.
Say your conference overall got mediocre ratings. You dig deeper to find out whats going on. The data show
that attendees gave very high ratings to almost all the aspects of your conference the sessions and classes, the
social events, and the hotel but they really disliked the city chosen for the conference. (Maybe the conference
was held in Chicago in January and it was too cold for anyone to go outside!) That is part of the story right there
great conference overall, lousy choice of locations. Miami or San Diego might be a better choice for a winter
conference.
One aspect of data analysis and reporting you have to consider is causation vs. correlation.
different attributes of the conference contribute to overall satisfaction. This, in turn, provides insight into what
aspects of the conference you might want to alter next time around.
Say, for example, you paid a high honorarium to get a top flight keynote speaker for your opening session.
Participants gave this speaker and the conference overall high marks. Based on these two facts you might think
that having a fabulous (and expensive) keynote speaker is the key to conference success.
Regression analysis can help you determine if this is indeed the case. You might find that the popularity of the
keynote speaker was a major driver of satisfaction with the conference. If so, next year youll want to get a great
keynote speaker again. But say the regression shows that, while everyone liked the speaker, this did not contribute
much to attendees satisfaction with the conference. If that is the case, the big bucks spent on the speaker might be
best spent elsewhere.
If you take the time to carefully analyze the soundness of your survey data, youll be on your way to using the
answers to help you make informed decisions.