4 ms·
I have an extremely hard time understanding how these surveys work, and what question people think they are answering. The headline number here doesn't seem unr
by addaon 5y ago
I have an extremely hard time understanding how these surveys work, and what question people think they are answering. The headline number here doesn't seem unreasonable at first glance, but what does it actually mean?
From the article: "About 71% of 18-to 24-year-olds said that they would consider looking for another job if their company insisted on them returning to the office full-time, compared to 61% of 35- to 44-year-olds and 56% of 45- to 54-year-olds, the report found."
What was the actual question asked, though? Was it "Would you consider looking for another job if your company insisted on you returning to the office full-time?", word for word?
How can any reasonable person answer "no" to a question in the form "Would you consider looking for another job if <condition>?" Given that so many people look for other jobs in any given period (say a decade), one has to assume that even more people (nearly all?) consider looking for another job in the same period. So without period restrictions in the question, why does <condition> matter to the answerer's answer? "Would you consider looking for another job? Yes, just like I would consider staying, consider what I'm having for dinner, etc."
I know this seems nitpicky, especially in the context of a survey that doesn't /seem/ to say anything surprising, but I really don't understand if I'm just overthinking things, if the questions that are being asked in these surveys but not disclosed are actually much better phrased than it appears, or if people are often answering a very different question than what the survey thinks it's asking.
- devonbleak 5y agoYeah my take is this is pretty meaningless - I "consider" quitting my job at least once a month and I have complete flexibility with remote work. Anecdotally up until recently we had a "hybrid" location requirement on our positions and consistently lost candidates to other companies offering remote. "Are you willing to move?" "yes." "Do you have a strong preference to not move?" "also yes."
- doubled112 5y agoYou can ask the questions based on the answers you want, right?
- boh 5y agoI think we need to collectively remove credibility from survey based results. It's funny that persistently reporting surveys in the news was originally conceived as a marketing tactic to articulate to people what they think, yet even now it's popular to take it seriously.
- mejutoco 5y agoOr they could report data on how the survey was conducted.
- spfzero 5y agoProbably 64% of workers "consider" quitting every week.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]