Olivia Trent is a newly hired systems analyst with your group. Olivia has always felt that questionnaires are a waste. Now that you will be doing a systems project for Ground Ride Sharing (GRS), a national ride sharing firm with branches and employees in 130 cities, you want to use a questionnaire to elicit some opinions about the current and proposed systems.

Question

a. Based on what you know about Olivia and G R S, list three persuasive reasons Olivia should use a survey for this study.
b. Given your careful arguments, Olivia has agreed to use a questionnaire but strongly urges that all questions be open-ended so as not to constrain the respondents. In a paragraph, persuade Olivia that closed questions are useful as well. Be sure to point out trade-offs involved with each question type.

Answer 1

a. Questionnaires should be used for this study because:

(1) It is an information-gathering technique that allows systems analysts to gather attitudes, beliefs, and characteristics from several key people in the organization who may be affected by the current and proposed system.
(2) It determines how widespread or limited a sentiment really is.
(3) It surveys a large sample of users to sense problems or raise important issues before interviews are scheduled.

b. Closed questions are appropriate when surveying a large number of people and when a large amount of data is to be collected.The tradeoff is that open-ended questions can help the analyst gain rich, explanatory insights, as well as breadth and depth of the topic. Although the questions can be written easily, responses to them are time consuming and difficult to analyze.