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