“…100 people surveyed…Survey says…”
We like to express our opinions, don’t we? And because we do, we also like participating in polls and taking surveys. This is so common a phenomenon that politicians and game shows depend on it. A prime example of this is the game show, Family Feud, originally airing in 1976, with Richard Dawson as the host. (The show is still currently airing, with Steve Harvey as the current host.)
The premise of the show is that contestants try to answer questions as did a group of 100 people who had the survey question posed to them. Then the host refers to the board to see if the contestant’s answer matches one up there. For many, Richard Dawson’s voice crying out “Survey says…” is stuck in our collective consciousness. So that’s where the title of this post comes from.
Anyway, in July of 2015…
we posted a survey through our Facebook page. At the time of the survey our Facebook page (CCBirthCenter) had 1330 followers. We used SurveyMonkey, to conduct this survey and got 100 responses in just 4 days. Unfortunately, Survey Monkey only allows for 100 responses to their free surveys and charges for anything over 100. Nevertheless, 100 is an adequate number to get a good idea of what our followers want. So we stopped the survey after reaching 100.
We asked only one question on our survey. We intentionally had Survey Monkey display the potential answers in random order each time the survey was taken so that the order in which they appeared would be totally random.
Please rank by order of importance what you consider the most important when choosing your maternity care provider. (1 being most important and 4 being least important, choose N/A if it is not important at all to you or does not apply)
-
where I give birth
-
the cost or affordability of my care
-
my provider’s training, experience and reputation
-
the quality of care that I will receive
- that someone I care about (such as a spouse or parent) will accept my decision
- that my personal birth plan will be respected
Each time a person ranked the value of one of the choices, that choice was given a value based on their answer. If they ranked it #1 it was given a score of 5. If #2, it was given a score of 4 and so forth. By scoring each choice this way, we are able to see how 100 people as a whole value each choice. We can also look at the individual items and see which one was ranked #1 the most or #5 the most and so forth. Survey Monkey allows us to sort the data different ways to see these results.
The results of our survey are very revealing. Let me show you exactly what Survey Monkey shows us. In these first two pictures, I have sorted the data by rank according to the overall answers. If you look at the last column, you will see that I sorted according to the final overall scores of all 100 participants. By sorting this way, we can see that the answer that was scored as the most important overall was “The quality of care that I will receive” and second to that was “That my personal birth plan will be respected.” Of least value among the five choices to our 100 participants was “that someone I care about (such as a spouse or parent) will accept my decision.”
“The quality of care” ranked most important in overall importance among 100 participants.
Now, I will sort the data by what answer got chosen as #1 the most often. The results are slightly different as you will see but otherwise about the same. The first two forerunners switched places this time but the order of everything else remains the same.
