Having used the Dance School Directory as a tool in finding dance teachers to fill out my survey I wanted to look back and see why it was inefficient in collecting results.
In order to gather a balanced view I wanted to involve dance teachers from all over the UK in my survey. Having looked into how I would achieve this as part of my inquiry plan I used the Google search engine to find ‘UK dance schools’ and on the first page of results found the UK Dance School Directory. It seemed to be the perfect site for me to use as it contained email addresses of dance schools right across the UK and was not specific to one style of dance but covered a whole range of different types of dance schools which is what I wanted.
Having sent out 110 surveys to dance teachers across the UK and only receiving one response before the two week deadline this resource proved to be unproductive. There are a number of possible reasons for this…
- Although the Dance Directory appeared on page 1 of the Google search this does not necessarily mean it was the best resource for me to use. I could have searched further and compared sites to make sure I had the one that would be most helpful to me.
- I do not know how up to date the information on the site is. There could be dance schools listed on there that no longer exist or have changed their contact details.
- I could have piloted the resource by sending out an initial email before the survey to see what the response rate was like, this may have indicated that the response rate would be low and I could have taken another avenue sooner rather than waiting the two weeks for the deadline.
- Although I provided information on the potential benefits of completing the survey I think the fact it was sent via email and the respondents were unknown to me didn’t help either. I know personally if I get an email from an unknown sender I am less likely to pay it much attention, and sometimes such emails go straight into your junk mail and you do not ever read them.
Although I eventually managed to get some responses to my survey after changing tact and sending it through my own networks and community of practice, time was wasted on the initial send out to potential respondants from the UK Dance Directory. This resulted in me being restricted with how long I could leave the survey open for when sending it out the second time as I needed to collect the data and begin analysing it before conducting any interviews (as I had wanted to see what came out of the survey and possibly explore this further with interviews).
Even though I got a much better response rate by sending the survey out a second time (72%), numbers were much lower than I had initially planned for as only 25 surveys were sent out in total and 18 were completed.
