Methodology- Survey Draft 1

Survey

Survey for NUS Law undergraduates and graduates

The purpose of the undergraduate survey was to understand more about the current curriculum of the NUS law school and try to identify the various communication skills thatcurrent law students felt were inadequately covered. As for the NUS law graduates survey, we aim to identify the communication skills which are vital and highly valued in the law industry.

We sent out the link for the survey of NUS law undergraduate to our friends while link for the graduate survey was sent to clubs such as the NUS law alumni and the Law Association. However, we only managed to obtain 93 respondents for the undergraduate survey and 3 respondents for the graduate survey. Hence, this data that we have collected regarding the communication needs of the law industry may not be representative of the whole pool of law undergraduate and graduate students. More extensive research is required to fully understand the communication needs of the entire law industry.

Our first survey targeted NUS Law undergraduates, as we wanted to find out the opinion of current NUS Law undergraduates with respect to communication skills being taught in NUS. We chose to target all levels of current NUS Law undergraduate.The survey was created online through the surveymonkey.com survey platform. This platform was chosen as most of our survey participants would have internet access and they would be able to answer the survey at a more convenient time and place. Furthermore, surveymonkey.com allows for easy tabulation of the survey results and generates pie charts. Our group approached the target audience through email, explaining what the purpose of the survey was and directing them to the survey via a link. Due to time constraints, the survey was aim to target around 15 to 20 respondents. Our group liaised contacts through some friends in the Law faculty and through the Law faculty student exchange programme.

The second survey was created to cater to NUS Law undergraduates who have graduated. This was to find out their perspective of communication needs in the law industry. This was to allow us to compare what law students thought of communication skills to lawyers in the workplace. And this would allow us to find out what communication skills the NUS Law faculty needs to focus on. Likewise, this survey was created online through the surveymonkey.com survey platform. This would facilitate easy collation of results as well as being able to reach out to larger audience of NUS Law alumni online. We posted the survey link on law alumni facebook groups, and explained the purpose of our survey. Another approach to disseminate the survey was to ask the Law alumni relations officer for help regarding forwarding the request for survey email to respective alumni members.

The questions for both surveys were structured in three different answering formats. Firstly, some were closed formats, with only yes and no answers. Secondly, some questions allowed multiple answers such as question (see appendix). Others were more open styled, having respondents rate the value of certain communication skills. Most of the questions had a ‘Not Applicable’ option to allow respondents to have a way to not have to answer a question. As well as an ‘other’ option to allow them in input other skills not covered. We started out with broad based questions such as ‘Have you had any internship experience?’ and ‘What is/was the job scope?’ This allows to respondents to warm up to the survey. After which we narrowed our focus to communication skills, and what is the value of various communication skills to them and how the NUS Law faculty facilitates the learning of these skills. Careful consideration was taken when phrasing the questions. This was to avoid leading and loaded questions which could potentially influence respondents’ answers.