You’ve hired a survey supplier, but something doesn’t look right to you. Trust yourself. Ask questions. Expect plain language answers that make sense to you.
Real World Example
The question below with response options is part of the famous Maslach Burnout Inventory survey. This is a go-to question used by academics to measure staff burnout in organizations.
“I have become more callous towards people since I took this job.”
- Never
- Once a month or less
- A few times a year or less
- Once a week
- A few times a week
- Every day
Flaws
Does this question hurt your head? There are numerous issues here.
- It just doesn’t make sense to say “I became more callous once a week since I took this job”.
- How would a person answer if they have been in the job for 10 years? For 20 years? What if they became more callous in their first year on the job, but not after that?
- Using this question, the level of burnout in an organization might depend on how long the employees have been there.
- While employees in the service sector may become more callous towards clients over time, they may also become more compassionate. And both feelings may happen over the course of employment.
- Although analysis of responses to this question always talk about current burnout levels, the question itself is about the past.
But mostly, the question just doesn’t make sense.
Elevate your Knowledge
If you want to know about the current state of burnout or other feelings, the survey question here needs to be time bound and focused on an employee’s current feelings of callousness towards clients.
For example, a survey might ask: “Thinking about the past 4 weeks, how often have you felt callous towards the clients you served? All the time, almost always, most days, a few days, almost never, never.
This is an improvement, but not a great fix.
Part of the problem here is that describing changes in a one’s feeling of being callous is not a usual thing for a person to do, or even to be conscious of. The Maslach Burn-out index uses a unipolar scale to measure the frequency of feeling callous. A survey might elicit more accurate data by using a bipolar scale that measures the respondent’s degree of callousness.
A unipolar question might look like this: “Thinking about the past 4 weeks, to what extent did you feel callous towards the clients you served? Extremely callous, very callous, somewhat callous, a little callous, not callous at all.
A bipolar question might look like this: “Thinking about the past 4 weeks, to what extent did you feel callous or compassionate towards the clients you served? Very callous, somewhat callous, a little callous. a little compassionate, somewhat compassionate, very compassionate.