Overview of Reporting Survey Data

The key deliverables used to share results of a survey with stakeholders are: verbal debriefs, reports, decks of tables, interactive online reports/dashboards, and calculators/simulators.

Verbal debrief

Most commercial survey analysis projects have one or more verbal debriefs, where a verbal description of the key results and their implications is presented to stakeholders. For larger projects, it is common to first create a topline debrief, in which the preliminary findings are presented, and then one or more detailed debriefs.

Usually this verbal debrief will be presented alongside a written report. 

Academic report

Note that the goal of this is rarely to communicate the findings. Rather, it is typically to provide that the findings have been conducted in accordance with the accepted principles of the displine, and this means that much of the content is not really relating to the data (e.g., literature review, methodology etc.).

Report

Most commercial survey analysis is reported via PowerPoint or Google Slides, or, increasingly, using online dashboards (more about them below). Typically these reports will consist of from 20 to sometimes more than 100 slides. 

Often these slides can provide very detailed information, as the goal is to make them standalone, so that users of the research who didn't hear or recall, the verbal debrief can still understand them.

In academic and government research it is common to instead provide reports in Word documents or PDFs. This used to also be common in commercial research, but it has long since fallen from the mainstream.

"Decks" of tables

Sometimes a "deck" of tables is provided instead of, or as well as, a written report and a debrief. These decks contain large numbers of crosstabs (e.g., every question in the survey by key demographics), allowing the person who has received the deck to analyze the data themselves.

Interactive online reports/dashboards

Increasingly interactive online reports, also known as dashboards, are used as replacements for, or, instead of, written reports and decks of tables. These documents can be created to share the style of information presentation that is provided in PowerPoint, but allowing the viewers to interact and gain further insight. 

Calculators and simulators

Online dashboards tend to limit analyses to crosstabs, visualizations, and filters of these. Some more advanced research techniques allow more complicated calculations. For example, an output from many new product development and pricing studies is a simulator that allows the user to answer "what if" questions.

The conjoint simulator below allows the user to change various properties of different brands and see predictions of the resulting market share.

Calculators and simulators are also sometimes created and shared in Excel.