Marketing Works Inc

Education Market Research: Designing Your Questions and Approaches

Once you’ve decided on what your sample group will look like, the next step in your education market research effort will be to determine what kinds of questions you’re going to ask them. If your sample group is truly representative of the larger group you’re profiling, the next opportunity for error in your project is in your questions and your approach to getting the information you need from your respondents. If you don’t ask the right questions, your data analysis won’t provide much in the way of helpful information.

Designing the Questionnaire.

This is where having an experienced education market research team working for you. One of the best ways to determine what kinds of questions to ask is to find out what’s worked in the past, and a dedicated team of experts will have access to published reports and successful questionnaire templates.

Once the research is done, the questionnaire must be tailored to the needs of the individual client. Your market research team will need to determine what kind of survey is most appropriate for the project at hand; what sentence structure and word choice is best; the order of the questions; and other details.

Most questionnaire questions boil down into a few different types:

Number questions.

Questions that assign a number as identification. These can often be used to separate questionnaire results from the individuals providing their answers.

Ordinal questions.

These are used to rank items in a list. Respondents can rank by priority, by preference, by the degree to which they dislike the items on the list — anything.

Interval questions.

These questions involve a ratings scale. For instance, respondents might be asked to judge the relevance and accuracy of statements on a scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Or they might be asked to rank how much they like a set of products on a scale of one to ten.

When you’re ready to begin planning your education market research initiative, give MarketingWorks a call. We’re sales and marketing experts working in the education field. So when you need to gauge the opinions and purchasing habits of teachers, professors, librarians and school administrators, we can provide a level of expertise that’s unsurpassed by our competitors. Give us a call today.