You are on page 1of 5

The Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey

Objectives

Identifying potential contributions of surveys and marketing research in organizations.


Learning in context the steps necessary to develop, design, write, and implement a successful
questionnaire, and effective ways to analyse and present the resulting data.
Gaining an appreciation of contemporary challenges associated with survey research. In
particular, how to structure and write engaging self-administered questionnaires, how to
leverage the Internet, how to create surveys that contribute to enhancing and maintaining
customer relationships.
Learning specific technical aspects related to the measurement of critical parameters such as
price sensitivity and attribute importance.
Improving the skill of writing good survey questions.

Go through the survey questionnaire in Exhibit 1 as a respondent. Reflect on your experience:

What are your feelings, thoughts (e.g., what images come to your mind?) and emotions as you
go along?
What makes you want to stop, what drives you to continue?
What is easy to answer, what is difficult?
What are the merits of this questionnaire?
What are apparent shortcomings?

Reflect on your own experience with housing as a graduate student.


Is there an important aspect of experience that was not captured by the 2001 survey?
Write a question (or a block of questions) that should be added to the survey to capture that
aspect in a manner that might impact decision making. Please dont forget to specify the format
of the answer to your question (e.g., a five point scale).
Predict the average answer(s) to your question(s) and the impact on actual decision making it
might have.
Try to achieve professionalism in your wordings.
When looking back at the 2001 survey, what news did it produce, what impact did it have?
Can you attribute this impact to specific features of the survey or of the survey design process
and circumstances?
What should be kept/removed in the 2005 survey? What could the survey do to contribute to
the Allston initiative in a useful way?
If not a survey, what else would you recommend to understand the customer in a way that
would inform long range planning in Allston (you might start by focusing on the three issues on
p. 10 of the case, and then think more broadly).
Against
Survey is too long and boring.
Too many factual questions. They should be retrieved from somewhere else using the Student
ID number.
Self-selection bias: people who elect to respond the survey are positively pre-disposed towards
Harvard real-estate services.
Some questions were hard to answer (trade-off questions in section F)
The survey makes simplistic assumptions about what drives satisfaction (e.g., location and
features, instead of more sophisticated human factors).
It is not open-ended and fails to create a space where consumers could voice their aspirations.
Will prove useless to address the organizational goal of defeating the private market.
For
Survey is thorough.
Survey focuses on straightforward data that are reliable even though they are self-reported.
Careful process integrating results with focus groups for better understanding.
Experienced as a rewarding journey through my housing experience.
Very large number of responses.
Segmentation/cross-tabulation of results by graduate school interesting and useful for action.
Replicable over the years for monitoring.
A good signal that the administration cares.
Harvard now has at least some numbers where there were none before.
Simple but useful insights into what students value most (e.g., apartment size secondary as
compared to location and price).

What Makes a Survey Successful?

Statistical concerns:

1. Presence of biases
2. Response rate
Experience of the respondent:

3. Realism (vocabulary used, attributes evoked)


4. Structure (presence of an introduction, structure that matches the chronology of the
consumers experience, location of factual questions, etc.)
5. Incentives to complete the survey
6. Likely impact on the satisfaction of the respondent
Decision value for the manager:

7. Opportunities to uncover implicit structures through correlation analyses (in this case:
correlations between graduate school belonging and housing preferences).
8. Production of simple surprising (stunning) statistics
9. Connectedness with managers goals.
10. Ability to compare and monitor data over time
Compatibility between the researcher and the respondents language and ways of thinking.
Perception of reward attached to responding to the survey: upfront incentives, thanking, making
the questionnaire interesting with a storyline (self-examination value).
Reduce participation costs: contain length, allow for self-administration at leisure and at home.
Trust: dont ask questions that might beg the response
why do you ask?,
stay on topic,
promise to share results.
Dont ask questions that clearly are not genuinely intended to inform you.
Have the survey sponsored by a legitimate authority

How to Write Good Questions?

If you currently live in Harvard housing, do you think that coordinating living arrangements with
a privately-owned housing renter would be more or less difficult than with HRES?
More or less
If you currently live in Harvard housing, what has been the single-most frustrating aspect of your
housing experience thus far?
[open-ended; to appear close to the beginning of the survey]
How do you rate the level of interactivity and active social/academic life of students within your
current housing?
[scale of 1-5]
How do you think the design and lay-out of your current housing contribute to this answer?
[1-5]
I would be in favour of designating a portion of on-campus housing as guaranteed on-campus
housing for first-year graduate students. This means that students in these apartments would
have to move out at the end of the year.
[scale of 1-5]
What changes/improvements would you like to see made to the HRES lottery process?
[open-ended]
Overall, how would you rate your housing experience at Harvard?
[significantly below expectations - below expectations - meet expectations -exceeds
expectations - exceeds expectations substantially]
Please rate your overall experience with this survey.
[choose one on scale: extremely negative negative neutral positive -extremely
positive]
Rank the following attributes in order of providing you a sense of "community": Diversity of grad
school representation, shops nearby, athletic/rec facilities, community space,
comfort/modernity of apartments, safety.
[multiple choice, ranking]

What Are the Limits of Survey Research?


The Harvard Graduate Student Housing Survey

Q1. When you look back at the 2001 survey, what news did it produce, what impact did it have? Can you
atribute this impact to specific features of the survey or of the survey design process and circumstances?

Though the survey was long, the design was very simple to understand. The easy and direct questions
that needed minimal thinking and no analysis were kept perfectly at the beginning, with the slight difficult
questions towards the middle and most of all, the demographic questions towards the end making the
respondent comfortable. The survey designers keenly developed some descriptive research about current
housing and transportation. Mostly the same kind of scale was used; not confusing the students is an
effectively right method to get more appropriate answers. The 2001 survey had rating questions so that
helped to compare against myriad segments to understand more significant differences.

The overall survey response rate was only 38% of the whole graduate students of Harvard Surveys was
not visually appealing and also had errors such as irrelevant, questionable questions. The length survey
could have been reduced by eliminating the repetitive answers in the question, for example, which
transportation you often use? The options were MBTA commuter rail, subway and bus could be clubbed
to option one as MBTA. The specific students course degree affiliation questions unnecessary make the
survey lengthy which can be removed.From the 2011 survey we learned that cost, space and location
were the most important attributes to students.

Circumstances

Vacancies were few and waiting list


Equivalent rental structure for Harvard operated and privately rented
housing
Followed prevailing market rental rate
Insufficient financial aid to counter high rents
Insufficient rental vacancy to absorb students
Students forced to live farther from campus
Fear of -ve impact on campus life and loss of graduates to competing campuses

Q2. What shoud be kept/removed in the 2005 survey? What could the survey do to contribute to the Allson
initiative in a useful way?

From previous survey we can keep

Current housing
Expectations from housing
Importance of housing features
About yourself

From previous survey we can remove

Transportation sec.: in 4 years less chance to change


Individual preference: results can be interpreted from previous survey and importance of
housing features section of current survey
The self-selection bias, because the people who elect to respond the survey are positively pre-
disposed towards Harvard real-estate services.
Some questions which were hard to answer

What could the survey do to contribute to the Allson initiative in a useful way?

To set not open-ended questions in ordert o create a space where consumers could voice their
aspirations.

To determine useful insights into what students value most (e.g., apartment size secondary as compared to location and
price).

Include staff as well in survey process as vision for Allston is urban, community and campus
environment.

To question students regarding housing with varied school composition

and examining student life in greater detail (socialization forms etc).

Q3. What makes a survey successful?

The key to a successful survey is the compatibility between the researcher and the respondents
language and ways of thinking. Another concers which can be taken into consideration are the realism, in
terms of vocabulary used, attributes evoked, the structure (presence of an introduction, structure that matches the chronology
of the consumers experience, location of factual questions and so on, the incentivesgiven tot he respondents to complete
the survey and the last, but not least the presence of biases.

Also the ability to compare and monitor data over time and the esponse rate are making a survey successfu.

Q4. What are the limits of survey research?

These include detail and depth of the data. Data which is collected via surveys lacks detail and depth on
the subject being researched . The responses to the surveys themselves can be a limitation as accuracy or
honesty issue may occur in the responses to the survey. The survey approach may have an advantage of
representation of the data that is produced but then as a result of this the emphasis on the responses to
be wide and inclusive limits the researchers ability to check the accuracy of the responses.

You might also like