Survey Data Analysis and Presentation
This paper focuses on using descriptive statistics to analyze and present survey results.
Qualitative data
This data includes the text of open-ended questions.
- Group into themes
- Indicate relative frequencies
- Provide example answers
Categorical data
- Often collected with close-ended selections
- Provide relative frequencies
Ordinal data
This data involves levels where the distance between each level is not necessarily consistent.
Examples:
- Novice, Intermediate, Advanced
- Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Often, Always
- Strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree
Analysis
- Median, mode
- Quantiles, percentiles
Interval and ratio data
Examples:
- Counts, time
- Subjective ratings
Analysis
- Mean, standard deviation
- Standard error for the mean, confidence interval
Data Analysis Tools
- Survey software (Qualtrics, Survey Monkey)
- Spreadsheet (Excel)
- Statistical software (R, SPSS, SAS)
- General purpose programming language (Python
Issues for discussion
- Why averages can be misleading
- Alternate ways for presenting quantitative data