Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey
The purpose of the 2001 survey is to obtain useful quantified information that would influence future design and marketing decisions as well as influence and change the dynamics of thinking at Harvard housing, to make it more centered on demand.
In section A “Current Housing”, there are five sub-sections, which are “What type of housing do you live now”, location, rent, “How do you know the current housing” and the housing features. In section B, the “Ideal Housing” section, the sub-sections are features of housing, type of housing, roommate preferences, marketing channel of housing, and “importance of the housing when first come to the University.” Section C is “Transportation” section, which is divided into two subsections, namely form of transportation and time of arrival and leaving. For the section D, the “Housing Features”, there are three sub-sections, including “neighborhood features,” “building features,” and “unit feature”. In section E, the “About Yourself” section, the sub-sections are academic and demographic information. The last section is “About Your preference,” whose sub-sections are preference of room type, “comparison among time, living space and rent”, “how to spend your time” and rent.
The sections of the survey are in the order of current housing, ideal first year housing, transportation, housing features, demographic, preference on housing and further comments. Looking at this survey, it is not in a logical flow across sections, for example ideal housing in section B is similar to the preference housing in section F, so they can be combined together to avoid confusion. Furthermore, demographic questions in section E should be covered at the end of the survey. When it comes to the flow within the sections, the questions are not well organized. For instances, skip pattern should be indicated in section A and section E based on respondents’ answer to get rid of ambiguity. In section F, the flow of subsections is not reasonable because the comparison among the factors should be located as the last question.
The overall questionnaire is relatively too long for an online survey, which might cause the arousal of respondents’ impatience and frustration. Moreover, all the instructions should be in capital letters instead of underline and italic to bring respondents’ attention while clarifying the intended instructions.
Regarding to individual questions, some of the choices are too long for respondents to read and understand. It might cause biases in answering the questions. In addition, there is a question in section A that requires calculation of the percentage of rent increased, which could increase the unwillingness of respondents’ participation. The wording of the questions in section A is also unclear. For example, the respondents might be confused about the difference between Harvard housing and Harvard owned-apartment or house. Furthermore, in section E, it is hard for the respondents to estimate the typical time of arrival and leaving the campus.
Aligning with the research objective, the section for transportations should be edited, leaving only the form of transportation, frequency and parking issues in order to identify necessary parking space for the housing. In section A, the calculation question should be changed into the question that requires the amount of rent increase. The comparison questions among rent, time and living space should be measured by constant sum scale to identify the relative importance of the three factors. The academic degree in section E should be deleted because it is irrelevant to the research goal.
The recommended ideal layout is as followed. The combination of ideal housing and preference housing sections should be located at the beginning at the survey in order to gets the respondents’ interests. The overall survey should be narrowed down by rephrasing choices into shorter sentences, eliminating overlapped questions and including skip questions for the respondents to complete it within 15 minutes.