Categorical variables (aka “factors”) are limited text choices as answers, such as “Male” or “Female,” a state in the United States, or a title. For example, a recent survey I completed produced the following simplified table of data for 94 leaders in law firms. A categorical variable for title included “Chief”, “Director” and “Manager.” The size of the firm created a second categorical, in the AmLaw 100 or not in the AmLaw100.
While developing a survey for a law firm about Work from Home policies (aka Return to Office), we arrived at a ranking question that included 16 potential advantages. That’s how many benefits to working from home we came up with (we developed close to that number of disadvantages, but no matter). The selections were so numerous that respondents might flag in their perusal of them, leading to primacy bias toward the first few selections being chosen more than they would have been if the selections were fewer.
When you are a law firm or a law department that wants to invite a plentiful group of prospects to take a survey, you will undoubtedly rely on a** bulk mailing application**. My only experience has been with Constant Contact, but I suspect that the comments below apply to any number of comparable applications, e.g., Dotdigital, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, Mailerlite, and Klaviyo.
You can easily copy an invitation e-mail, make changes, and keep track of your different ”campaigns.
Assuming you try more than one method to reach potential participants, you may want to learn which sources or methods were more successful. You would like to know absolute numbers of participants – “doing X method produced 25 participants – and proportionate numbers – “ZZ percent of the people sourced by phoned took part.” On the negative side, you also want to get a handle on where efforts to publicize the survey produced an insufficient number of new survey takers.
You want as many people as possible to complete your survey. For that reason, as you decide on the first version of the questionnaire, you inevitably drop questions that would stretch the survey discouragingly long – who will trudge through 55 questions? Or you’d love to know about the law department’s square footage, but that inquiry takes research to answer. Perhaps you admit that you can’t phrase the question or its selections in an unambiguous, answerable way.