Electronic flight bags / electronic in-flight data

Here we go again. Post moved to existing thread by same poster.

Clearly getting a Masters is not particularly hard these days!

Not to beat on a dead horse, but what is the material difference between:
– At the current price, electronic flight bags provide a good value
– Electronic flight bags are a good value for the money
– Electronic flight bags are reasonably priced
All three questions are on the same page of your survey.

Same with:
– People whose opinions that I value prefer that I use electronic flight bags.
– People who influences my behaviour think that I should use electronic flight bags
– People who are important to me think that I should use electronic flight bags

IMVHO the differences are so subtle that these are in effect identical questions. But perhaps my ELP is insufficient.

Your ELP is just fine. This is typical modern-day Masters thesis drivel level.

In fact, based on what I know of the current system in the UK, I am surprised the student is doing this. Normally, the work would be done by a “contractor”, for a few hundred €

julian_vw wrote:

ust to see a difference if someone is answering a question very positive and another one with the same meaning very negative. That’s how scientific research is working, unfortunately

But I imagine how you can understand how frustrating it is for people with little time (and near zero incentive) to answer these multiple times. It probably significantly decreases the reply rate (people will quit mid query)

Never mind those, who quit mid query, but if the questions are designed to be checkpoints / basis for verification, one should at least use a thesaurus to make them less identical – the way they are set up now, it defeats the purpose, and, based on @Noe’s comment, does more harm than good.
Yes, designing a good survey is both an art and a science in its own right, and given that it appears you want the survey to be a significant (?) part of your research methodology, the one you have isn’t really up to snuff, if “Joe Random” saw through it.
Yes, how surveys are designed and implemented is a pet peeve of mine with most “survey based research”, including the stuff my wife is involved in.
Not trying to be an ass, far from it, but this just isn’t good stuff, sorry.

Certainly, it is a valid method to have such questions, to see if the respondent is awake / not entering malicious answers / etc. However, you should not make it obvious.

julian_vw wrote:

It was coded correctly but I changed the layout with “strongly agree” on the far right.

It’s not about “coding” – it’s all about what people mean when they click an answer. With your layout if someone ticks the second box from right, there’s no way you can now if this respondent meant to say “strongly agree” beacause the column label said “strongly agree” or only “agree” because it was not the rightmost box and no-one ready column labels in such surveys. Answers to a survey in this layout are simply unusable.

julian_vw wrote:

That’s how scientific research is working, unfortunately.

First of all it’s not unfortunate that scientific research is working with consistency checks on its results!
Second people who do such questionnaires for a living (or at least learnt how to do them) would never repeat the same question twice to see if people give the same answer. It’s e.g. much more powerful to ask the negative of another question to see if people really click the opposite answer!

I would really be curious on what conclusions your research will draw from the answers to this survey. While it is completely obvious that there will be zero insight into the questions it pretends to ask, there is obviously a lot you can derive from the answers (including a sociodemographic analysis of social platform reactions to badly designed questionnaires).
The reason why it will be completely worthless for the original question is btw. that the way you set it up is so extremely biassed, e.g.:
- You advertise it in a Pilot-Board. Population in such boards is extremely biassed and does not at all represent average pilot population (But perhaps that is the design of the research: You might have a different link for the same questionnaire that you post on the door of local flying clubs and in real you are interested how different the answers from these different populations are…)
- You frame the subject in an extremely biassed way at the start of the questionnaire: “…gaining more and more popularity here in Europe. Nevertheless, the use is still lacking acknowledgement in comparison to the US.” (really? Even if you had hard evidence for these different levels of “acknowledgement” why do you mention it before someone takes the questions? Do you want to test if such pre-bias makes European pilots to “advocate” more for Apps?)
- You offer a subscription to one specific EFB as incentive for participation. Obviously the value of this incentive is much higher for existing user of this specific app than for users of a competing app.

I could go on for hours. All of that is not a problem at all – as long as the conclusions drawn from the survey match the biasses and in the end we will not read something like “European pilots believe there’s Hughe value in EFBs…”

Good Luck!

I am delighted that @julian_vw’s finally got the columns in the right order, but he still has:

I believe electronic flight bags are independent of place.

I really wish I knew what that meant.

I am glad that I don’t want a FF subscription and that if I did, I could afford to buy one.

I just looked at the French, which is

Je crois que les applications de planification et suivi de vols sont indépendants des lieux.

So I guess he means that they can be used in more than one location, which, I suppose is part of the point.