Monday, March 11, 2019

Ridiculous employment categories on surveys

So, I do a lot of surveys, between Swagbucks and Mechanical Turk. As I complete them, my brain seems to have developed a hobby of assessing survey design. Most of the bad questions I come across tend to have the flaw of breaking down options so that most people would fall into the "other" category – and sometimes they don't even offer one, so respondents are required to pick a choice that is not remotely close to the truth.

A particularly laughable one I keep coming across is the ones that ask what category your role at work falls into, and then have options of:

CEO
President
Vice President
Senior Management
Junior Management
Supervisor
Person who sweeps the parking lot

Putting aside for a minute the idea of CEOs and such doing surveys on Swagbucks, are these people not aware that many (most?) skilled employees are not in any sort of management position? These aren't surveys that are only screening in management folks. They ask if you are employed, and then they ask which managerial rank you hold. They sometimes only have managerial ranks, or sometimes they have managerial ranks plus an option like "clerical." There's no option for most of the people who do most of the work most places.

Just what kind of workplaces are these folks coming from and basing their model on? Where are these places where you have clerical people, then a bunch of managers? What exactly are the clerical people doing paperwork/communication for? What are the managers managing? How does any work get done in this place?

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