From my point of view, all reports of survey results should include a fulsome methodology description. No matter if the sponsor is a law firm or a legal vendor, if the survey went outside of the organization for participants, the report should describe the project openly and transparently.
More specifically, the goals of a methodology section in a survey report are twofold. First, to let people determine whether your steps to handle the data of the survey sample were evenhanded, thought through, and carefully applied.
If a survey by a law firm, department, or vendor were an academic major, then related to it would be many minors. Put differently, those who sponsor online surveys in the legal field need to till competently in the core acreage, but ancillary fields of knowledge stretch all around it. Or as the title’s metaphor suggests, survey know-how shines brightly in the center, while planets of associated knowledge circle around. The core comprises representative, accurate data analyzed thoughtfully.
A rule that admits no exception commands survey designers to end the selection items of a multiple-choice question with one item: “Other.” Survey experts hold much less adamant views regarding whether to tack on any or all questions a variation of “Not applicable” or “Don’t know enough to answer.” Yet for a respondent either of those choices may be the most appropriate on any given question.
If you don’t include them, the respondent may pick an item, but that choice is based on too little knowledge or too little relevance to that person.
if your law firm (or any of its partners) hosts a blog, then once you have published your survey report, you should publish at least one post about the findings. As an example, Morrison & Foerster fielded a survey in May of 2020 about the impact of Covid19; they announced the survey on their blog with a brief description plus a link to the full report.
You will likely reach more people if you break your principal findings into a series of blog posts.
I urge survey designers to reconsider – – polite talk for shun – – Yes/No questions because most of life scoffs at such a solar flare versus Stygian darkness view of anything; the messiness of life almost always demands more complex, nuanced answers. Sure, “Were you born in Texas?” admits to a binary answer, but just as surely, asking internal clients, “Are you pleased with the service you receive from the law department?