The questions about positive/negative influences were CEA requests (although we did discuss them together): I believe the rationale is that for positive influences, they were interested in the most important influences (and wanted to set a higher bar by preventing people indicating that more than three things had the “largest” influence on them), whereas for the possible negative influences, they were interested in anything which had a negative influence, not merely the largest negative influences.
Regarding donations: historically, we have always asked about the previous year’s income and donations (because these are known quantities) and then planned donations for the year the survey is run (since people likely won’t know this for sure, but it’s still useful to know, for broader context. Now that we launch the survey right at the end of the year, the difference between past and planned donations is likely less acute. Naturally, it would be ideal if we could ask for income and donation data for both the previous year and the present year, but we constantly face pressure to include other questions, while trying to maintain survey length, so we have had to leave out a lot of things. (This also explains why we had to cut the questions we had in previous years asking about ‘individual’ and ‘household’ figures, given that many people’s earnings/donations are part of a unit).
That should work well for you this year then: this year you’ll report how much you donated in 2019 (and how much you plan to donate in 2020). Next year you’ll report how much you actually donated this year and how much you plan to donate overall next year.
Hi Denise,
Thanks for taking the survey!
The questions about positive/negative influences were CEA requests (although we did discuss them together): I believe the rationale is that for positive influences, they were interested in the most important influences (and wanted to set a higher bar by preventing people indicating that more than three things had the “largest” influence on them), whereas for the possible negative influences, they were interested in anything which had a negative influence, not merely the largest negative influences.
Regarding donations: historically, we have always asked about the previous year’s income and donations (because these are known quantities) and then planned donations for the year the survey is run (since people likely won’t know this for sure, but it’s still useful to know, for broader context. Now that we launch the survey right at the end of the year, the difference between past and planned donations is likely less acute. Naturally, it would be ideal if we could ask for income and donation data for both the previous year and the present year, but we constantly face pressure to include other questions, while trying to maintain survey length, so we have had to leave out a lot of things. (This also explains why we had to cut the questions we had in previous years asking about ‘individual’ and ‘household’ figures, given that many people’s earnings/donations are part of a unit).
Darn, I donated a lot more in 2019 than 2020.
That should work well for you this year then: this year you’ll report how much you donated in 2019 (and how much you plan to donate in 2020). Next year you’ll report how much you actually donated this year and how much you plan to donate overall next year.