Assignment #5—Measuring Family Member Satisfaction

One of the most popular uses of written surveys is to gauge customer or employee satisfaction. For this exercise, you are an independent management consultant working in Monroe County. The Hickok Center for Brain Injury, a small local nonprofit organization, has asked that you conduct a preliminary analysis regarding the creation of a survey instrument to measure the satisfaction that clubhouse participants' family members have with the Center's programs. Since the clubhouse members are in various stages of recovery from a traumatic brain injury, the family members play a big role in the ultimate success or failure of recovery efforts. It is therefore essential that these family members understand what the Center is trying to accomplish and be satisfied with the programs offered there.

Your first step will be to take another look at The Hickok Center for Brain Injury's web site: http://www.hickokcenter.org

Then, after you have finished all of the assigned readings, you can begin to develop your set of questions (i.e., survey items).

The Center will be interested in such questions as the following (note that these are only samples of the topics that could be touched on in the survey):

· Was it what people expected?

· Did they enjoy the activities?

· Were goals and objectives met?

· What are our strengths and weaknesses?

· Would they recommend this program to anyone?

When you have finished creating your set of questionnaire items, write up your preliminary recommendations in a brief 2-3 page (double-spaced) memo. In developing your questions, be sure to follow the guidelines for good survey items you have read about in this module's readings and in the mini-lectures.

One of the most important lessons of this module, as outlined in the "How to Define the Goals of the Research" section of Statpac's Steps in Designing Customer and Employee Satisfaction Questionnaires is that you must determine the goals of a survey before you begin to write your questionnaire items. For this reason, at the beginning of your memo, I would like you to report the goals of your survey (aim for 2-5 goals) in bullet points. Then, present only the most essential items (between 10 and 15) that you recommend for inclusion in the survey. Write these items in proper survey format. Along with each of your recommended survey instruments, provide (where appropriate) a brief 2-3 sentence justification for why that item is essential, and why it should be written in the manner you recommend.

Click here to view a high-quality sample of this memo from last year. Note that the subject of the sample memo is a survey of clubhouse members, while you are creating a survey for the family members of the clubhouse participants.

I will also give you the option of creating this assignment using Zoomerang, a powerful online survey tool. You can sign up for and use the basic version of Zoomerang for free. This will give you an excellent opportunity to try first-hand this increasingly common survey-generation method. If you do avail yourself of this option, I'll add 5% extra in bonus points to your assignment grade (e.g., instead of 8.5 / 10 you'll receive 8.925 / 10). Add in your goals for the survey at the beginning of your online survey, and differentiate your instructions for each question from your "justifications" for those questions (see above) by placing the latter within square brackets -- for example, "[This question is important because it....]." When submitting the assignment to me, note that all you will have to do is e-mail me the URL (web page address) for the survey.

This assignment is due November 2^nd at the beginning of class.