FAB School Surveys

What you get when you choose us:

access to extensive expertise in survey design and deployment
an online survey designed with children in mind
online access to results that can be interrogated easily and quickly by you using our Lodeseeker™ technology
high quality analysis of results
highly responsive, experienced personnel who listen to your needs and get your project done on time and within budget

Our latest project:

- working with Gloucestershire Children & Young People's Directorate to gather information about the health & well-being of young people in Gloucestershire's schools - see our case study describing the 2006 and 2008 projects. The 2008 survey results will be launched in late September 2008.

News:

We have been commissioned by the Department of Health to produce reports based on the Gloucestershire survey and they will be publishing a white paper later this year detailing best practise for surveying schools - more details later.

Why Online Surveys?

We have concluded that on-line surveys are the most effective and offer the best value for the collection of data from pupils because of the many advantages this approach offers over conventional paper surveys. Some of the reasons are:

Young people often feel more comfortable expressing their views on-line than by conventional pen and paper.
The on-line survey is designed to attract and keep their attention. This is much more interactive than a conventional approach, “fun” to look at and satisfying to complete.
The survey can be included within an IT lesson.
Data collection is automatic and without the inherent errors and time delay connected with the data entry process of paper surveys.
An on-line approach will be financially much more cost effective over time.
An on-line approach saves paper and associated printing and postage costs of at least 270,000 sheets per survey year.
Editing the survey over time is possible and additional questions or complete surveys can be added to the existing structure.
If you decide you would like to survey other year groups this can be done with minimised costs.
The survey is delivered through a normal browser, so no extra software is required to be loaded on your PCs - you just need an internet connection.
Survey results are delivered via a secured website, so as well as allowing access to results using our Lodeseeker™ technology, it is possible to build up links to other reports and information relevant to the project if and when required.

Our scoring methods

As with other surveys, we have different methods of getting answers to our questions, including radio buttons, check boxes and free text input. However, our main method of collecting answers is based on a sliding 1000 point scale (0-100 with 1 decimal place) superimposed onto a categorical scale:

as you can see, this replaces the normal array of radio buttons that you see on normal surveys. The advantage of this is that the respondents can choose where they want to be on the scale - they are not restricted to a choice between "very involved" and "quite involved" - they can choose to place their answer between the 2 - so they can say they are "involved". The results are numbers - so, for example, "involved" might be recorded as 87.9 or it might be 82.3. This gives us the possibility to present the results as both a categorical scale (e.g. 87.9 would score in the "very involved" category, 82.3 would score in the "quite involved" category) or as a number - which means we can calculate averages as well as being able to do lots more statistical analyses.

Lodeseeker™ Reports

Lodeseeker™ provides a dynamic, permanent and direct resource via the browser to the User. Controlled access means schools can see only their own data whereas county officers can see the whole picture. The filtering facility means that ad-hoc queries can be made for every question using survey demographics (eg gender, year group, school district, survey year) and the data can be viewed either in comparison with county-wide values or compared within each demographic – so, for example, you can compare boys with girls or years 1, 2 and 3.