Surveys
Why a Survey?
As we continued our literature review on millennials, we found some conflicting results. For example, some literature argued that millennials tend to defy authority while other literature stated that they obey the hierarchy and order found in most organizations. Other assumptions like the distinct balance between work and life that millennials strive for is ungrounded. Some research says that they are more likely to prefer flexible work hours, which blurs the line between work and life. These contradictory opinions led us to question many of the statements about millennials we encountered.
The contradictory readings were not the only problem we encountered with our background research on millennials. Some of the research on millennials we read was not conducted in a scientific way. Certain books written by popular authors draw their conclusion based on assumptions rather than data. That kind of reasoning may be intriguing to some extent, but those conclusions have little reliability.
Finally, the research topics on millennials are often confined to what types of traits they have, what formed those traits, what the difference between millennials and former generations is and other topics that do not directly get at what we want to know. To help our design, we would like to know more about how millennials behave in the workplace, what their attitudes are toward work and social relationships, and to what extent their tech-savvyness influences their daily job.
In order to deal with the aforementioned issues, we decided to conduct a survey. In addition to solving many of our problems, we also chose to conduct a survey because relative to other methods like interviews of focus groups, a survey could obtain a great deal of information in a short amount of time.
Survey Construction
There were more than 40 questions in the preliminary survey. Some of the questions were generated in brainstorming sessions and some were from interviews we conducted with millennial workers. We cut the initial set of 40 questions down to only 25, based on where we wanted to focus our research on. We organized our survey into three different parts: Work-related questions (8), work environment questions (6) and finally some demographic questions (11).
Survey Implementation
We used Survey Monkey as our main tool for organizing the survey. After putting up all the content on Survey Monkey, we tested the survey and fixed some minor problems. We distributed the survey through two different channels because we believed that would reach a balance between having a low cost while still being well representative of the millennial population. The first channel was our own personal network. Since each team member has a different background, everyone’s personal network is distinct, giving our sample a good distribution. The other channel was alumni of Carnegie Mellon University. Although they all come from CMU, they are currently in vastly different industries and taking many different roles in their work.
Participants
One hundred eleven people filled out the survey, out of which 106 were effective responses. The gender breakdown came out to 53 males and 52 females with an average age of 25.03. Eighty-nine of the participants were single, while the rest were married or living with domestic partners. Only four of our participants had kids. Seventy-seven(69.4%) participants had started their current job within the last year.
Findings
A summary of the findings from the survey can be found on the findings page
