This is a take-off on a paper title from the ESOMAR Panels Conference. The golden goose is, of course, the panel respondent. The theme of this paper and another as well is all about treating respondents better in online surveys. Pete Comley, a Brit who worked as a psychologist before running a company called Virtual Surveys, authored the second paper and framed his talk around Transactional Analysis (TA), a sort of popular refashioning of Freud that had its 15 minutes of fame back in the 1960s. The short description is that we interact with others and they with us in one of three ego states: Parent, Adult, and Child. As long as both actors are in the same ego state the interactions are happy and you produce "warm fuzzies", but when you get crossed transactions you get "cold pricklies" and counterproductive behavior.
Sadly, our tendency in Web surveys is to create crossed transactions and cold pricklies. We are always directing and correcting respondents, and sometimes in not very friendly ways. Or, the the language of TA, Parent->Child. No adult enjoys being treated like a child so most Web surveys are handing out cold pricklies. No wonder we have high termination rates and satisficing! Comley’s advice is to work harder at creating Adult<->Adult transactions with respondents. He has seven suggestions:
- Create email communications (including survey solicitations) in Adult<->Adult style.
- Handle screenouts gently and with friendly, rational explanations for why we are not interested in their opinions.
- Make our error messages friendlier.
- Allow respondents some freedom to select which questions they answer.
- Allow respondents to add their own questions or answers.
- Allow respondents to continue discussing the topic after the survey is complete, say, by directing them to an online bulletin board.
- Create community forums on specific topics and point respondents to them.
To be honest, my enthusiasm for these drops off some as I move down the list but I love the general concept. Unfortunately, Comley did not come with any data to convince us that working harder to produce warm fuzzies in respondents has clear benefits over the cold pricklies we seem to be creating now. That would be an interesting experiment. In the meantime, the least we might do is have a close look at our error messages.