Making Trade-offs

I’ve just finished putting together a survey for one of our local schools. With state budgets in dire shape, school districts will be cutting back funding, leaving parents/PTAs to make up the gap. I could discuss the inequity of this issue until I’m blue in the face, but that really doesn’t have much to do with research.

How to make trade-offs is an interesting topic for researchers. Clients are always interested in how their customers choose Product A over Product B, or which features are most important (oooh, there’s that rating/ranking concept again!). In the case of our local school, it’s which programs are parents’ top priority for the PTA to continue funding.

There are 9 programs for parents to prioritize encompassing everything from drama classes to teaching assistants–with all kinds of things in between: librarian assistant, playground equipment, instrumental music, etc… Which ones to fund are not easy choices for the PTA to make, nor for parents.

And, keeping the respondents in mind (in this case public elementary school parents) the survey can’t be long, nor can it be very complex (no conjoint analysis here for you hard-core staticians). With that in mind, I developed a simple ranking and budget allocation model for the survey. I asked the parents to rank the 9 programs in order of importance, and then gave them a hypothetical budget ($1000) to allocate across those same 9 items. In addition, I assigned a dollar value associated with each item so parents could understand the ramification of choosing one item over another.

In this case we really needed both questions–ranking the items allows the PTA to understand what is most important to parents, if money were no object or if fundraising wildly exceeds expectations, while having parents allocate hypothetical budget dollars helps bring their priorities back in line with reality.

And, hopefully inspires them to donate more money…