Our standard questionnaire has a demographic question asking respondents to indicate how long they have worked for their organisation. Response options given are:- Less than 12 months
- 1 - 2 years
- 3 - 4 years
- 5 - 9 years
- 10 - 14 years
- 15 years and over
Occasionally we get feedback from survey respondents, telling us that we have "missed out" some options - for example, how should they respond if they have been with their organisation for 2.5 years - there's no "2 - 3 years" response option to select. The reason why the response option banding is like this is because we wish to avoid overlap. If we had the options "1 - 2 years," "2 - 3 years," and "3 - 4 years," then a person who has been with their organisation 2 years would fit into 2 bands - this would be poor question design and cause genuine confusion. By laying our response options out the way we do, someone who has been with an organisation for 2.5 years should select the "1 - 2 years" band - because they don't yet fit into the next band. This works the same way as the age bands - if you are 39.5 years old, you fit into the "30 - 39 years" age band, because you don't yet fit into the "40 - 49 year" age band. Our experience is that even if people are confused by the options, or disagree with our above reasoning, they will still put themselves in the correct length of service band as it will be the only one that applies to them.
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