ANONYMOUS SURVEY

EXAMPLES

Three very diverse instances are provided below to demonstrate how universally useful doing an anonymous poll is. Regardless of business or research area, we may use many of the same principles to our strategy.

Example 1: customer satisfaction

In this case, an independent drugstore wishes to better serve their neighborhood. They determine that a survey will assist them achieve three goals:

1) Determine overall client happiness.

2) Enhance the consumer experience

3) Organize their inventory

Consider the stock goods that a business like this may have. Medication, menstruation products, and home cleansers are examples of extremely intimate information. Local customers are eager to join and assist the shopkeepers in optimizing their store, but they are reasonably concerned about secrecy.

To keep the findings, secret while yet allowing for follow-up with locals, the business prepares an anonymous online survey, which they distribute through their newsletter. They disable all conversion trackers, which would show which newsletter subscribers opened or finished the form. After completing the initial anonymous survey, they develop and implement an action plan. The shop sends a follow-up survey to the same email list to collect feedback on their proposed enhancements.

Example 2: employee workplace culture

In the following example, around 100 workers begin to receive anonymous allegations of workplace bullying on public web forums. Because no one is mentioned by name, the HR department is unsure who to approach with follow-up inquiries. Their technique to combat workplace bullying begins with the creation of an anonymous survey to obtain a comprehensive picture of how workers perceive the present business culture. They ask employees questions on how secure they feel, if they are aware of correct reporting processes, and whether they or someone they know has been bullied at this firm. Finally, they ask respondents to identify someone they know who has engaged in bullying conduct.

Because the answers to these questions may result in reprisal from the individual or persons who are bullying others, this poll must be kept anonymous. Employees may keep their colleagues and higher-ranking persons responsible without jeopardizing their employment or security.

Following the collection and assessment of the initial corporate culture survey findings, HR may develop an action plan that includes a more focused but still careful study based on the trends in their comments. They decide not to require responders to identify themselves in order to protect and trust their staff as much as possible. HR, on the other hand, had to address the accused bully with concrete cases.

Example 3: a sociology course assignment

In our third example, a college student conducts a brief poll of their peers’ spending patterns and socioeconomic origins. This poll contains identifiable information such as shopping patterns and preferred brands, as well as normally confidential information such as parents’ income levels, respondents’ income levels, and cultural opinions on finances.

The student conducting the study does not want her knowledge of her peers to impact the outcomes. With this in mind, she builds an anonymous survey and carefully chooses survey question types to ensure anonymity. She does this by including multiple-choice, constant sum, and other questions with fixed response ranges. This survey is distributed through email to the student’s classmates and other university students. She also forwards it to their connections.

By making the survey available to students outside her university as well as persons in each student’s social networks, the survey maker makes it more difficult to identify respondents based on their responses. She wants to ensure that her feedback sources remain anonymous, so she chooses a survey with Respondent Anonymity Assurance (RAA). It enables her to contact people without disclosing their identities.