Sport England Survey

[Adrian]

The survey is generic so that they can compare sports.

[Scott]

But it wouldn't have taken much effort to have customised it to each individual sport by removing all the questions that are irrelevant to that sport (rather than relying on the participants to select NA).

[mikey]

As one of the key performance indicators seems to be an increased 'satisfaction rating' based on this survey, with this year setting the baseline, may be it would be judicious not to be 'too satisfied'.

[roadrunner]

But it wouldn't have taken much effort to have customised it to each individual sport by removing all the questions that are irrelevant to that sport (rather than relying on the participants to select NA).

But I'm not sure we'd all agree which ones were irrelevant, so apart from any "no brainers" (I think in the survey description they mentioned water temperature, obviously irrelevant to anything except swimming etc.) it's probably best to leave the rest in. That way, that can see what participants really think is relevant to their sport - which might not always be what they'd expect.

[Scott]

Q. Some questions are not relevant to participation in my sport. How will this be dealt with?
All questions, with a small number of exceptions (i.e. we will not be asking respondents in a sport self evidently non applicable questions, such as asking badminton players what they think of the pool water quality) will be posed to all respondents. It is the respondents’ decision as to whether a question is or is not of relevance to them. The respondent can then choose how relevant it is by completing the satisfaction and importance question, or selecting ‘not applicable’.

Secondly, the purpose of this piece of research is to find out what is important to the participants when thinking about the satisfaction with their sporting experience, not what we/sports practitioners think is important to participants. It is not the responsibility of the research or Sport England itself to dictate what areas of sport are important to the individual participant.

Ho hum. I think the last sentence gives it away - they've even managed to confuse themselves over the difference between importance and relevance. Personally, I'd rather see them take out the "no brainer" questions and then remove the "NA" column entirely: as it is, it's not entirely clear what the difference in meaning is between "NA" and an importance of 1/10. For awk's "cleanliness" example I can see some people picking one and some the other when they're both trying to express the same opinion, which (so my GCSE Maths tells me) is not good survey design...

[ifititches]

if some questions just throw up random answers in a sport their data analysis should highlight that and it will be reflected in the final report. I presume it's all going into some standard statistical analytic programme to do just that. If some questions are useless/ambiguous they can be modified for the next one to make them more useful.

Perhaps the next round will also allow them to get a bit more sport specific, based on our answers this time.

I guess they wouldn't have put the questions in if they hadn't come up as important in a lot of sports during the groundwork for the survey.

[funnyrunner]

what a rubbish survey, beware there's no way you could give thoughtful answers in 15 mins, although i don't know how long it takes, as i gave up... waste of time

[roadrunner]

what a rubbish survey, beware there's no way you could give thoughtful answers in 15 mins, although i don't know how long it takes, as i gave up... waste of time

Don't you think that's a bit too negative? You're not supposed to mull over every question, I think, just give your immediate reaction, so I don't think it takes anything like 15 minutes. Any survey that tries to cover a huge range of sports will inevitably have some questions that aren't terribly relevant to some of them, but I think there were quite a few that could give useful feedback - such as what people think about the need for, and availability of, coaching.

[Scott]

I've just received my invitation to the follow-up to last year's Sport England Satisfaction survey. The survey seems to be much the same as last year (although with a peculiar progress bar). If you took it last year, maybe check your spam folder for an invite...

[Scott]

Well, the headline results from the 2010 survey are out, and it appears that overall we have become less satisfied since last year.

Orienteering

Code: Select all

      Overall  General participant  Affiliated club member  Talent pool
2009  83.4     81.6                 85.1                    83.9
2010  81.0     76.6                 85.4                    82.3

All sports

Code: Select all

      Overall  General participant  Affiliated club member  Talent pool
2009  80       79.8                 81.2                    82.2
2010  76.5     76.2                 78                      79.7

The general trend across sports has been for decreased "general participant" satisfaction, and orienteering has also suffered a drop in this area. Orienteering has however maintained it's relatively high "affiliated club member" satisfaction in spite of a general decline.

I have no idea what (if anything) all this really means - the detailed results are supposedly due out soon - or how statistically significant the drops are, but I think increasing satisfaction in this survey does form one BOF's targets ("outcomes") from Sport England, so this probably isn't entirely good news.

[SeanC]

Clearly there are less satisfied people filling in the survey for the second year. Being satisfied types, they found something more satisfying to do, leaving the survey to be completed by the unsatisfied types who gained satisfaction by recording how unsatisfied they were. This has created an unsatifactory bias.

Because of our unsatisfactory public finances, this survey may not continue, which could be satisfactory, or unsatisfactory.

[AndyC]

Sean -you're not by any chance related to Sir Humphrey Appleby of Yes Minister?

[RJ]

He might be.... but he couldn't possibly say!

[PKJ]

Well, the headline results from the 2010 survey are out, and it appears that overall we have become less satisfied since last year.

But, in fairness, orienteering is still the 6th highest out of the 46 sports included.

Though a casual reader of this forum might find that hard to believe - maybe a high level of 'satisfaction with the sporting experience' is consistent with ..er.. discussing it a lot afterwards.

[NFKleanne]

It could be down to the fact you are in beautiful places, with friendly people, who offer their time to enable you to participate in a sport!!!!