Like most professions, the world of data collection is full of jargon.

Market researchers who spend years running complex projects can casually throw around sophisticated survey terms, but the rest of us need a little help from time to time.

That’s why I have compiled this glossary of five common survey-related terms that may be a little tricky to get right. Take a glance, and soon you’ll be talking about non-biased cross tabulation using panel data with the best of them.

Accessible

Accessible surveys aren’t just intuitively designed. When a survey is “accessible,” it works the same for respondents using speech to text software, screen readers, or keyboard navigability as it does for those responding in more traditional ways.

To meet these requirements, you’ll need to be mindful of the question types, fonts, alt text, and interactions. 

 Bias

A distortion, either conscious or unconscious, of survey data. It may affect the accuracy of conclusions or actionable decisions based on that data.

There are several kinds of bias related to surveys and data collection, but the two most relevant to us are response and non-response bias. The first, response bias (Hawthorne effect), is a skewing of data due to quality of the questions asked or responses collected.

For example, if you ask, “Do you think purple is the best color in the world?” you’re going to get very different answers than if you ask, “Which color is your favorite?”

Another kind of bias to be aware of is non-response bias. This type of survey bias is related to the sample of respondents rather than the way a question is structured.

For example, if your goal is to survey an accurate sample of the population to learn about overall color preferences, you would try to target a perfect cross-section of the population to get accurate data.

 Crosstab Data Analysis.

Cross-tabulation analysis, also known as cross-tab, is often used by market researchers to show the relation between two different variables. The value of this type of data analysis is being able to quickly determine the correlation between the two variables that might not be apparent when viewing the entire data set as a whole.

Simply put, a cross tab report allows you to cross tabulate at least two questions, one on the horizontal axis and one on the vertical axis. You can use cross tabs to analyze what is driving your survey results by more closely examining trends and patterns.

Panel

Survey panels are simply a collection of people who have indicated a willingness to take surveys. They’re paid for their time and effort, and the organization who facilitates survey distribution to their panel audience (called a panel company) also requires a fee to access their audience.

 Piping

Piping can be a very confusing term, because it’s an online survey that doesn’t have an actual pipe anywhere in sight. But piping simply means pre-populating a survey question using information you already have.

Brian Agaba 

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