2018 Survey is now closed!
I want to extend a HUGE thank you to everyone who participate, and to those who passed this on to other hams as well. This year had a much larger turnout that 2017 and hopefully this trend will continue.
So - the 65 million dollar question is...when will the results be posted?
Short answer is anywhere from 4-8 weeks from now.
My next steps are to pull the data out of the survey and begin to cleanse and normalize. Each question with an open ended response can be anywhere from 10-15 hours of work, depending on the variance of the response. It's important to me that each response is valued, as a result I want to ensure this is done well.
As an example, I provided some options for "How did you find this survey?" and also left it open to people to enter in their own choices. Some example responses I received are:
- Emailed
- Emailed from another ham
- Got an email from my dad
- Gmail
- Someone mailed it to me online
I have to normalize all these responses into one category so the overall picture of how the survey was received is as accurate as possible.
Secondly, there is some cleansing to be done as well. When there are multiple entries from a singular call sign, those are pruned out. The validity of the data depends on this kind of pruning. In addition to pruning duplicate call signs, I have some other tricks up my sleeve, which I won't go into. This is a unique problem that doesn't have a great solution. Google Surveys will allow me to lock this down to one response per person, however that requires a Google account to be used. This can create large groups of people who are unable to complete the survey and I want this survey to be completed by as many hams as possible.
After this the data is then modeled, in a way I can use to analyze for insights. This enables the ability to make correlated assumptions, such as "does the reported income level change a preferred radio company?" or "a large percentage of young hams feel that old hams are a problem in the hobby" and vice verse. This gives much deeper insight when compared to a simply pie chart response.
The final step is to pull all this into a presentation vehicle (in this case Microsoft Sway) and publish out to you, in the hopes you enjoy it and learn something. This is where I can be creative and I make sure to take some additional time here to make it "look pretty". I'm not paid to do this, it's a fun diversion from college and work, so it takes some time. If I continue to do this, I'll probably formalize a more rigid structure and road map.
So that's it folks - the data is in and soon enough we'll have something meaning and interesting to look at. Again, I hope it's something you enjoy reading and that you learn even one thing from it. If you have questions, please reach out to me and I'll respond when I can.
Dustin N8RMA
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