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Getting Action from Organizational Surveys: New Concepts, Technologies, and Applications (J-B SIOP Professional Practice Series)

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Allen Kraut's collection of contributed chapters is not a survey methods text with guidance about question wording and sampling formulas. He directs readers in need of such guidance to his earlier volume, Organizational Surveys: Tools for Assessment and Change. This book contains advice from leading survey practitioners about how to design, conduct and report results from surveys in ways that will foster positive change in the organization under study.

The twenty-four chapters are organized into three sections. The "New Concepts" section discusses employee participant views of survey research, use of survey results in business planning, and linking survey results o subsequent organizational development efforts. Chapters in the "New Technologies" section reports innovations in web-based survey delivery, automated processing of responses to open-ended questions, quantitative analysis, and creating effective presentations based on survey results. "New Applications," the final section, describes a variety of scenarios in which survey results have been used, including corporate mergers, employee engagement and retention, and managing conflicting cultures in international organizations.

My most useful chapter was "What Did They Really Mean? New and Emerging Methods for Analyzing Themes in Open-Ended Comments" by Patrick Kulesa and Ralph Bishop. The authors overview text mining and text analysis technologies for extracting meaning from narrative survey responses. Their work involves using the WordStat content analysis software to create word lists that identify key words used by survey participants. This approach works because open-ended responses tend to be brief (40 to 80 words) and use a restricted vocabulary that is closely related to the survey topic. These researchers highlight the value of open-ended question analysis to identify new ideas offered by an organization's employees.

Your most useful chapter may well be a different one. This collection is recommended for survey practitioners who have mastered the basics of their craft and want to fine-tune their survey efforts to achieve greater impact.