Mobile versus Paper surveys from a tourism research perspective
Adventa, a rural development initiative that provides assistance and support to Monmouthshire’s rural businesses, uses a combination of paper and mobile interviewing techniques to gather feedback at festivals and events. The organisation, among other initiatives, helps organisers to access new audiences and maximise their events. In addition, they offer tools to help the organisers gain customer insight through visitor and satisfaction surveys with the help of Snap software. Due to the type and format of the festivals, adventa has found advantages and disadvantages of using both paper and PDA devices in the field. Read on to find out their experiences.
Louise McGuinness, adventa’s Festival & Events Organiser spearheaded the introduction of Snap within the organisation, after attending a sector specific networking event. Prior to having an in-house tool, the company paid for consultants to gather feedback and report on the findings, which was more expensive and offered very little control. Snap is now part of their long-term strategy, which will generate a future return on investment and will ideally enable each organiser to take ownership of the survey. Louise is already seeing the benefits and after attending training can now set up and design surveys quickly and easily. Louise adds ‘I must also commend the HelpDesk support team who are very patient and helpful whenever I have any queries.’ The software has already been used to streamline the research process at a number of festivals this year including Two Rivers Folk Festival, Monmouth Show and South Wales Shire Horse Society. Louise hopes that Snap will be used to aid Monmouth Women’s Festival in March as well as various other shows throughout the festival season.
Mobile Interviewing versus Paper surveys
All of the research projects conducted on behalf of the organisers are in fields or open town centres and range from visitor, satisfaction and exit surveys. Due to the nature of the research, adventa has overcome a number of hurdles.
Mobile Interviewing using PDAs
Adventa wanted to bring their consultation to the 21st century by using PDA devices and employing a small number of students and staff to interview the audience. Since implementing this technique they have had a positive response from the public, who seem to be more inclined to take part in a survey. The mobile devices have also attracted a younger audience, who are more readily accepting to participate. Further positives are that the interviewer stays in control of the process plus time and money is saved by the elimination of data entry. On the down side, each researcher can only interview one person at a time, so it is a slower process than a self-completion paper survey. This is a real disadvantage when conducing exit surveys, as the interviewers only have a small period of time to get a representative sample of the audience and this quota may not be reachable.
Paper surveys using the traditional clipboard method
Adventa has found that by handing out paper surveys on clipboards for self-completion, multiple surveys can be filled in simultaneously. This is particularly effective when they need to get a true representative sample for an exit survey and only have five members of staff to conduct this. One of the main disadvantages of this method is that the feedback and data then has to be input for analysis, which takes up more time and resources. Plus, as the interviewer doesn’t have any control over the process, delegates write extra comments in the margins, which then need to be dissected for relevance.
The conclusion is that both methods have merits so adventa now choose the form of interviewing best suited to the type of event and the research objectives. However the feedback is generated, it is imperative to the success of these events. The quantitative results provide concrete evidence that is extremely influential when applying for extra funding.
Find out more information on Snap’s mobile interviewing options for pda surveys here.
For further information on adventa visit www.adventa.org.uk.