Yesterday, I received some great feedback about a workshop I ran. Sorry if this sounds horribly self-congratulatory, but I’d like to share it with you. At the start of the workshop, one participant politely explained that she couldn’t stay for the whole session as she had a plane to catch. This struck me as a pretty good reason for an early departure and I was glad she had taken the trouble to tell me rather than just stalking out without an explanation making me wonder if I had offended her or simply bored her to despair. She also added, apologetically, that she was a nervous traveller and preferred to get to the airport several hours ahead of her flight rather than risk being late or arriving in a rush.
I was therefore surprised to see her at the end of the session. Having forgotten to bring formal evaluation forms, I did at least remember to ask the participants if they had found the workshop interesting and helpful. Smiling, the anxious traveller simply said ‘Definitely — I decided to catch a later bus’. Next time (if I remember to produce an evaluation form) I think I’ll replace boring Likert scales (please rate the course from 0-5) with some new end-points: Please rate the workshop on a scale of ‘a total waste of time, I wish I’d been somewhere else’ to ‘worth missing a bus for’.
On a slightly more serious and less promotional note, this made me think how unimaginative most rating scales are. How on earth do we know whether one patient’s score of 3 on a 0-5 scale of how they are feeling is the same as the next patient’s 3? Yet simple numerical scales are common, especially for measuring symptoms such as fatigue or pain. ‘Good enough to miss a bus for’ may not be particularly helpful for clinical ratings but maybe similar concrete examples would help.
About Liz Wager
Liz Wager is a freelance writer, trainer and publications consultant who works
for a number of pharmaceutical companies, communication agencies, publishers and
academic institutions. She is also the Secretary of COPE (the Committee On
Publication Ethics) and a member of the BMJ’s Ethics Committee.