You are employed by a University as an Alumni Relations Officer to contact exstudents. The University is keen to keep in touch with ex-students, partly for fund
raising purposes, partly because it wants to find out what careers students go into
first after graduating and also because it wants to find out how satisfied students are
with the education they received.
You decide the best way to gather information about the students is to send out a
postal questionnaire to their home addresses, which the University has kept a record
of.
You construct a questionnaire consisting of three pages of closed questions and send
it out with a second class stamped address envelope to return the questionnaire.
1000 of these questionnaires are sent out in July and the questionnaire asks the exstudents to reply by September.
Monday morning, October 1st
You are sitting at your desk on the first Monday morning in October. You have in front
of you 100 returned postal questionnaires. Some are incomplete.
On your own, answer question 1.
Q1. Why did you choose this method in the first place – what advantages did it have
for you?
1.
2.
3.
4.
Work with the person next to you to answer question 2.
Q2. If you could not use any other method, what else could you do to improve the
response rate?
1.
2.
3.
4.
Q3. Now in groups of about 4 draw up a list of advantages and disadvantages of
postal questionnaires.
Advantages
Disadvantages