Insider Look: The Journey of Surveying Pandemic-Related Challenges

Determining the Objective of the Survey

The primary purpose of this survey is to help me understand pandemic-related challenges faced by my communities in a form where their experiences can be authentically understood.

Keeping in mind the limited time and effort others are willing to spend on this survey, I provided a multiple-choice section with options of potential pandemic-related challenges and positioned it as the starting question. This will ensure the responses I receive are constructive and help respondents understand the potential topics they can express in other parts of the survey.

I included an option for respondents to share their unique experiences with particular challenges. Their experience can help me better understand the challenges they were addressing and make my future content more relatable to other readers.

Last but not least, I want to gauge the time my prospective readers are willing to spend reading each of my posts. Knowing this, I can provide just enough information to keep my readers both enlightened and engaged.

Determining the Audience of the Survey

The Re-Equip project was founded by me to help people in my community, including students, faculty, and staff at my school, people of local Troy communities, and my friends from afar. From my experience of leading the Philosophy Club, I found many adult faculties just as eager to learn about philosophy as students. However, adults, especially staff, in my communities often do not have access to the intellectual resources on campus and are often the ones being hit the hardest by the pandemic. Considering this, I sincerely want to survey the staff at Emma (including the cleaning staff and the dining hall staff) as well as other local communities of Troy that I can reach out to.

Revising and Testing Out the Survey with Ms. McGivern and my Friends

I sincerely appreciate everyone who has helped out in this process; their fresh perspectives detected countless errors and ambiguities and provided me with precious suggestions: one friend prompted me to clarify if the challenges and experience respondents share need to be related to philosophy (spoiler alert: they don’t have to); another reminded me to disable respondents’ ability to access others’ responses.

Ms. McGivern has kindly pushed me to evaluate the rough number of responses I look to receive from the survey. At this point, I believe a minimum of twenty to thirty responses provide me with sufficient information moving forward. To encourage more people to respond, I strived to make the survey more simple and concise, combining several similar questions and wording each question in simpler terms.

To my delight, all of my friends were able to fill out the survey within five minutes with some taking as little as one minute. Many of them returned to fill out the survey again when new ideas came to them! With eight initial responses, I have gotten a rough impression of pandemic-related challenges faced by people in my community.

Biggest Challenge along the Journey

I was hesitant to make the form anonymous. I had purposefully set the form to record respondents’ email addresses for easier contact with them if I would like to share their experiences combating challenges on my website. At the same time, I believed that recording the email addresses would not discourage anyone from giving valuable responses. However, one of my friends brought up an extremely good point: not everyone in the school knows me very well and they may shy away or be afraid to fill out the form unless it is anonymous. In the end, I agreed and made the form anonymous.

Moving forward, I will give a short introduction to my project and the purpose of the survey during Morning Reports to promote my project and the survey.