This blog post highlights the Iterative Survey’s special ability and demonstrates why the survey is considered ‘iterative’.

To define a social group, we could record all experiences, feelings and attitudes relating to group membership for as many members as possible and compare the lists. Some elements will be idiosyncratic, some will be shared. For social research, the definition must only identify the target group, not similar groups. Therefore, the lists must be reduced to only those elements that are both shared and distinctive. These characteristics encapsulate ‘groupishness’ (Evans et al. 2019, p. 1561). The ‘Iterative Survey’ uniquely captures this groupishness by identifying shared yet distinctive aspects of group membership.

The Iterative Survey (Cosgrove, 2024) offers potential for a wide range of social research: it could be used to explore the groupishness of pre-service teachers on their first teaching placement, of parents whose children are beginning school, or of how PE teachers assess risk. While other survey types could collect information on any of these groups, they would not be able to discern the distinctive elements of groupishness. The context used here is an exploration of the groupishness of teachers with maths anxiety (MA).

A full explanation of how to conduct an Iterative Survey can be found in Cosgrove (2024) so I will only briefly outline it here. All iterations of the survey begin with a branching question to separate in-group and out-group respondents. A single iteration of the survey consists of three types of item: 1) the posing of a new question (by an in-group respondent), 2) the answering of a previously posed question (by both in-group and out-group respondents), and 3) the making of a discernment between previously collected in-group and out-group answers (by an in-group respondent).

In item type 1, an in-group respondent poses a question that would enable them to distinguish a fellow teacher with MA (in-group member) from a non-MA teacher (out-group member) based on anonymised answers only. This prompts the respondent to sift through their experiences of group membership and select one that they believe will be recognised by other in-group members (and is thereby shared) but that will not be well understood by an out-group respondent (and is ttherefore distinctive). For example, they might ask, ‘What was the worst thing about maths when you were a pupil?’ This question becomes item type 2 in the following survey iteration, answered by both in-group and out-group respondents (the latter pretending to be in-group). Answers like ‘Being given no help when struggling’ and ‘Feeling panic when another child marked my work’ are then presented to an in-group respondent in a still-later iteration (becoming item type 3). If the question was well chosen, the out-group respondent’s answer would not fool the judging in-group respondent.

‘The Iterative Survey has a special ability to capture distinctively characteristic elements of group membership.’

The survey is considered to have discovered an element of groupishness that is both shared and distinctive if a statistically significant proportion of type 3 discernments are correct. The degree of groupishness captured is indicated by the percentages of correct discernments made. The Iterative Survey has a special ability to capture distinctively characteristic elements of group membership.

Being asynchronous and online, the Iterative Survey is convenient for participants to complete and for researchers to administrate. It is inexpensive and can reach hard-to-access groups, such as maths-anxious teachers who are both geographically dispersed and hidden within the wider teacher population. While participation time is limited to about 15 minutes, the Iterative Survey includes items that demand more consideration than other survey types, so topic salience and the cognitive abilities of the group should be considered before implementation. The Iterative Survey is not recommended for research on especially sensitive topics such as domestic abuse.

This blog post has introduced a new type of survey: The Iterative Survey. It has demonstrated how content moves between iterations and demonstrated the Iterative Survey’s special ability to identify the groupishness of groups through capturing shared yet distinctive elements of group membership.

References

Cosgrove, F. (2024). The Iterative Survey adaptation of The Imitation Game: A survey approach to defining group identity through analysis of distinctiveness. Methodological Innovations, 17(4), 203–214. https://doi.org/10.1177/20597991241285802  

Evans, R., Collins, H., Weinel, M., Lyttleton‐Smith, J., O’Mahoney, H., & Leonard‐Clarke, W. (2019). Groups and individuals: Conformity and diversity in the performance of gendered identities. The British Journal of Sociology, 70(4), 1561–1581. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12507