Assignment 3 - practising survey creation

I think it would be helpful if I provided some background for the survey I'm about to share with you. I am involved in a historical re-creation group called the Society for Creative Anachronism. It is a group that studies and then attempts to re-create the middle ages (generously considering that to be 600ish -1600ish). I chose to use this venue to practise survey taking because it would allow me access to different people for testing the survey and an easy place to put the survey into practise (plus I'm genuinely interested in the results :). Just to clarify a couple of terms within the survey (that won't need to be clarified to the participants), like most international organizations we are organized as branches, my local branch is called a Barony in includes Saskatoon with surrounding area (most of the northern half of SK). The next level is called a Principality and encompasses SK, AB, plus the northern and western parts of BC. The Kingdom to wish we belong includes the rest of BC, Washington and Oregon with the northern tip of Idaho. If you are curious about the organization please feel free to ask me, or visit http://www.sca.org/ or to view my personal pictures of activities, visit http://picasaweb.google.com/raouldelaroche.

The purpose of the survey is mostly to gather information about the opinions of those who are participating in the activities of the society within the principality. There are several topics within this that could be considered for a program eveluation type of situation. As with most administrations of large groups of people, there have been many attempts (few of them organized programs) to do a multitude of things ranging from education of the membership, develop specific activities, recruit and retain members etc. As an involved member, I have been involved in many of these "programs" and am curious about their effectiveness - thus the connection to program evaluation :). These thoughts were the primary consideration of questions and topics for the survey. In addition, however, I also contacted a couple of other people in the leadership of the principality to see if there were questions and/or topics that they would like to see included in the survey.

Detailed purposes of each section:
PG1 - demographics & membership
This section is pretty self explanitory. It's purpose is to gather demographic information and determine if the participant is a member or not. There is interest in membership because in our society there are only a few activiieis that require membership to participate. There is a debate as to whether or not this should change. Many people say that 75% of our active participants do not have memberships. I do not believe that to be the case in our principality and am hoping to gather some information about both the numbers of members and the reasons why the participants have or do not have a membership. There have been some previous surveys done and it would be of interest to compare data and any activity (campaigning) done to convince people on either side of the debate.

PG2 - activities
There is an extremely wide range of activity in the SCA. I find it interesting to see what activities people are involved in and to see f there are any trends or themes that stand out.

PG3 - travel
In the last 5-10 years there seems to have been a change in the travel patterns of people in the principality. During many disucssions there has not been an explanation offered that seems reasonable to very many people. I would like to try and discover what some of the current patterns are and some insight into why.

PG4 - opinions
A few of these statements are 'hot button' items during discussion. There are some previous surveys asking similar questions and I would like to gauge changes in the general opinions of the participants. Questions regarding the transparency of decision making was the topic requested by someone sharing the leadership role at the principality level. Most of these ideas are quite complex and would be difficult to answer in such a straightforward way, but I choose to present them this way deliberately - almost like taking a temperature - I'm hoping to gain a general feel about the issue, not all of the context (that would be a different survey :).

PG5 - awards
I am mostly curious about this section cross references with other questions.

PG6 - recruitment and retention
This is a topic of conversation that has become more and more frequent of late. I am hoping that this survey will be provide information from wide section of participants and will provide some good insight that will be useful.

Once I designed the initial questions I sent them to six people for feedback and comments. I selected a mixture of geographic locations (Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton, & Medicine Hat), both genders, several age ranges. All of these people have had several years of experience in the society, would be interested in seeing the survey collect useful information (I think) and have at some point been involved in administsrative matters to varying degrees and in various ways. In hindsight, all of these people are professionals (one is a student) and probably should have attended to that. As well, I should have asked at least one person who is fairly new to the society to review the questions.