Most of my students in in communication campaigns and evaluation of communication materials classes have conducted their needs assessment and audience analysis surveys. The guide below should help put them and other students writing up survey results on track.

After you have analyzed the survey data, your next task is to organize them into a coherent report. The purpose of a survey report is to tell the readers the following:

• research problem
• data collection methods used
• findings
• conclusions

Thus, like other research reports, the survey report should consist of these parts:

• executive summary
• introduction
• methodology
• results and discussion
• conclusions

An important part of the final report is the executive summary. Busy decision makers may not read anything else in the report. The executive summary should describe the:

• survey objectives
• summary of the results
• conclusions and recommendations

Immediately after the executive summary, you will find a table of contents. As the term implies, this section lists the key contents of the report and their corresponding page numbers. Appendices, which may be survey tables and graphs that were not integrated into the body of the report, are included as well.

The following are the major sections of the survey report:

1. Introduction

1. overall background of the problem – describes the significance  of the problem to the country.  For instance, if the survey was on weed management practices of rice farmers, the introduction should deal with the importance of weed management in rice growing areas and the magnitude of yield losses due to weeds.
2. general situation in the survey area -   provides a description of the survey area in terms of population, geographical location, major crops grown,  etc.  Here, present a location map of the survey area.
3. objectives  of the survey -   presents the survey objectives.

2. Methodology

1. survey population – describes the survey respondents, e.g., rice farmers, fruit growers, and from which province or district they come from.
2. data collection method – explains how the survey was carried out and discusses the sample size and sampling procedure.
3. survey questionnaire – presents the major sections of the research instrument.
4. pretesting – describes the pretesting process and how the pretest results were utilized to improve the questionnaire.
5. data analysis – explains the analytical tools used to describe the data.

3. Results – Survey results are usually organized around the major sections of the questionnaire.

4. Conclusions and Recommendations - The conclusions highlight your research findings.

5. Literature Cited

This section lists the sources of information and publications that you referred to or cited should be included.

Guidelines in writing up the survey findings

1. Describe the data presented in tables and graphs.
2. Highlight important findings and provide the supporting table immediately. The general rule is to place the text just before the table or chart being described.
3. Describe the highest proportions in the table or chart first. If you look at the example in your handout, you will notice that the discussion starts with the highest proportion, i.e., “Own seed”.

Farmers obtained rice seeds for sowing from a number of sources but two-thirds of them (63.9)) relied on other own sources (i.e., from their previous harvests). Other farmers either obtained their seeds from the coop (24.1) or from their neighbors (10.6%). Farmers obtained seeds from these sources because they get better seeds (58.5%), or that it is cheaper to do so (30.48%), Table 29.

Table 29.   Sources of rice seeds and reasons for choosing these sources.

_________________________________________________

Item             Districts III & IV (%)    _________________________________________________

Sources

Own seed                   63.9
Coop                            24.1
Neighbors                 10.6

Reasons

They are better seeds      58.5
They are cheaper           30.4
_________________________________________________

2. Rationalize the results and bring out any underlying pattern in them, especially when discussing a two-way table.  Interpre­t the results but be careful not to go be­yond the results obtained.

To illustrate, consider this table and write up from the Report on the  KAP Study on the Strategic Extension Campaign on Integrated Weed Management in the Muda Irrigation Scheme, Malaysia:

Types of land tenure and size of land ownership

On the whole, the respondents were equally divided along the various tenurial categories found in the Muda region. This is to say that 37.9% of the respondents were owner-operators, 37.2% were owner-tenants (i.e., they own as well as rent the land from someone else), and 24.8% were pure tenants.

There were slightly more owner-operators and less owner-tenants in the southern districts (III & IV) compared to the northern districts (I & II) but the difference is not statistically significant (Table 5).

Among the farmers in both district clusters who own the land (operators and owner-tenants), majority of them did not own more than 10 relungs:  53.5% between 1 to 4 relungs, and 41% between 5 to 10 relungs.   Only 15 farmers (5.2%) in this study owned more than 10 relungs, one of whom owned more than 20 relungs.

Among the tenants and owner-tenants from both clusters, 44.9% of them rented between 1 to 4 relungs and 47.1% between 5 to 10 relungs.  Only 22 (8.1%) of the farmers in this study rented more than 10 relungs of paddy land, three of whom have more than 20 relungs.

3.    Describe relationships, don’t just symbolize them:

For instance, the statement below may not be easy to understand by the readers of a KAP survey report:

We found r = .72, which means that age explains about one-half of the variance (r²=.49) in scores.

Instead, one should write it up as follows:

About half of the differences in knowledge scores on weed management is accounted for by respondents’ education:   farmers with  higher level of education were more knowledgeable than those with lower levels of education.

4.  Put your results in context by comparing them with previous research or with existing theory in order to explain them.

5. Give reasons to account for differences between your research and previous research or existing theory, or to explain unexpected results.