Surveys Make Your Report Go Round
Up until the start of this module, I never had to write a report or conduct a survey, so I was pretty nervous, when I started out.
Since I do not have any previous experience of writing a proper report and only superficially believe in the power of surveys ('Never trust a survey you didn't falsify yourself!', as the German will say), I found it difficult for the longest time to put up a survey. And I still find it difficult, if I am being honest.
When I started out my survey, I was unable to ask the right questions which quickly showed by the results I was getting back. I thus decided to put up a 'mock survey' for myself and for a small test group on an online forum in order to practice asking the right questions. I thought that this test run might help me getting an idea of what I essentially want to know and of how I can ask for that piece of information without incorporating any form of direct or indirect bias.
In my first run, which I unfortunately cannot publish here due to reasons of confidentiality, I quickly realised that my way of asking did lead nowhere. As you might know from previous blog entries, my report subject will be on the situation of female cinematographers, internationally and nationally. I decided to tackle this topic, since I wanted to know what I was giving myself into on a broader scale within the industry, and to see how and what could be done to improve the situation not only for myself, but also in general.
Know thy enemy, they say.
So when I conducted my trial survey, I realised that I had asked too much in an - sometimes imprecise, sometimes too specific - way, confusing my contributors. I furthermore forgot that I was not exclusively dealing with filmmakers there, and that many did not know what cinematography entailed or what a cinematographer does, let alone have an idea about the situation for women working in that area.
So when I realised that I only gathered few answers with a lot of 'I don't know's' or spaces left blank, I knew I had to structure myself better first in order to get results that were usable and interpretable.
So I sat down after that debacle and firstly decided on what I need to know precisely and on what I need to explain in an unbiased way in order to get hands on information I could use. It turned out that my fear of asking too biased or leading a question was what got in my way and thus had to be counteracted by asking more open questions with enough restriction that my contributors would be able to give good answers on even such a difficult topic they may know nothing about (which female cinematography is, in a way).
I decided to go with a string of questions, asking for my contributors estimation of certain numbers such like employment rates, Oscar nominations or wins by female cinematographers, and asking them for their opinions on what might be hampering women and of what could be done in order to improve that situation.
With the last two questions especially, I decided to not only offer four possible solutions each, but I also decided to give them a fifth option where they could enter what comes to their minds.
So I offered a variety of possible answers and selected them in such a way that they might inspire my contributors to build upon that in their own response. I decided to choose what I would call 'placeholder answers', that represented a single aspect of a certain area (education, woman's quota, harassment, etc.) and see whether that inspired them to expand onto further options that could be counted to the same area or even entail a completely new one.
So much so for leading questions, eh?
However, when I was finished with my second attempt, I felt that I had chosen the right questions (and possible answers), that I decided to go full force by using SurveyMonkey and create a proper survey (time pressure is the best motivator after all) and put it out there via Facebook.
So far, my attempt proved to be successful, since I have already received 23 answers within a single NIGHT. Apparently, offering a variety of possibilities and an option to hear their own spin on things really worked out.
My survey is, as of now, not concluded yet, but I already received a good variety of age, gender, and opinions that will help me further in my report. The current questions and statistics, confidential as well as automatically generated by SurveyMonkey, are as follows:
Initially, I also wanted to contact and include cinematography collectives and associations as first hand sources as well, but that was simply rendered impossible this time due to time management issues and restrictions. My days need to be 48h-long in order to manage my ambitions.
But having said that, I am looking forward to collecting more information and start on my report as soon as possible.
For I still need to figure out how to properly WRITE one.