WRITING PLAYS AND WRITING SURVEYS

Most of my working life I wrote surveys. Telephone surveys, mailed questionnaires, focus group scripts, Yatta Yatta Yatta. This taught me my way around dialogue. Questions had to be clear and concise, understandable and in the right order, and the responses to the questions had to be so that I could tell what the respondent meant by what they said or wrote. No “When did you stop beating your wife” type questions.  Follow-up questions had to be written right and placed appropriately. I had to train interviewers on how to read these questions to potential respondents over the phone. And I had to be able to analyze these data so I could answer the questions the client needed answers to.   

Another example: “Do you own your residence or do you rent it.” You could answer this question yes if you owned your home and had renters. Trying to interpret ambiguous data is like death.  

I used to respond to surveys even though as a professional in the field, I should have been ruled out. I simply lied when they asked me if I was a professional survey researcher, but I wanted to hear how they did it. One particularly stupid survey for a local hospital, the interviewer asked me, “How would you rate the food?” and then give me a one to five scale where 1 was excellent and 5 poor. I told her I’d never been to the hospital and therefore couldn’t answer. (True) She should have skipped me, but she didn’t and asked “If you had been to the hospital, how would you have rated the food?” I should have been what they called “screened” This really bad question has stayed with me. I don’t if the person who wrote the script messed up, or whether the interviewer wasn’t trained properly, or the interview made a mistake and misread the script.