Surveys, Opinion Polls, and Focus Groups: Some Thoughts on How to Report Data
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Surveys, Opinion Polls, and Focus Groups: Some Thoughts on How to Report Data
MoryAnn Foote, PhD M A Foote Associates
Key Words
Data validation: Information gathering; Manuscripf preparation; Statistical analysis
Correspondence Address Dr. MaryAnn Foote. M A Fmfe Associafes (email: [email protected]).
Data collected from surveys, opinion polls, and focus groups can be valuable to many groups involved in the development, marketing, promoting, and regulating of biopharma products. To be valuable, however, certain standard processes must be used and reported in a manuscript based on the work. often data collection
and analyses are not adequate, and interpretations of thefindings are overextended togroups not suweyed. Examples of potential problems and solutions to problems in reporting results of surveys, polls, and focus groups provide writers with guidelines on how to strengthen their manuscripts.
INTRODUCTION
SOME DEFINITIONS TO START
Frequently, as a reviewer for the Drug Information Journal and other journals, I am either confronted with a survey article to review for possible publication or I am asked to accept survey findings from a clinical study written into a primary manuscript. While I am not trained in surveys or opinion polls, I do realize that there is more to a survey than simply asking your office mates questions at lunch. Surveys and opinion polls can collect valuable information: they can suggest how the consumer views your product, how patients use your company website, what payers are reimbursing, what problems may arise from changing the way your monitors do their work, or any number of other issues: however, to be a valid instrument (ie, scientific, rigorous, repeatable), certain conditions must be met. My intent is not to discourage the use of surveys or the publication of articles based on surveys, but rather to offer some suggestions to improve the reporting of surveys in Drug Information Journal. Tomes have been written about surveys, opinion polls, and focus groups. Academic courses are offered on the topic. These efforts are not duplicated: 1 write from the perspective of an author and a reviewer, not as a statistician. This article is not the final authority on the topic. An excellent guide is available online and was written to help nonstatisticians with surveys and opinion polls (1). Another useful website provides information on survey ethics and standards (2).
Surveys, opinion polls, focus groups, and censuses all have the common thread of gathering information. A survey is generally understood to be a sampling of representative individuals from a population. Surveys can be conducted in person, by telephone, online, by mail, or by a combination of these methods. Opinion polls are surveys generally designed to collect opinions about current issues. Focus groups are also surveys, but a focus group is composed of preselected members who fit a specific demographic description. Unlike members of a survey, who should be random and representative of the population as a whole, me
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