A New Design for Survey Feedback

Survey feedback is a social technology without much theory to offer alternative design strategies or to explain why it works when it does. The present study presents a theoretical discussion analyzing and explaining the use of group methods in feeding back diagnostic data to organizations. A new design the peer group-intergroup model is presented and compared to the traditional family group model. Data evaluating one implementation of this design showed how senior officers of a bank might change their attitudes toward the relevance of a diagnostic study and their willingness to consider changing their own behavior. An explanatory model for the new design, derived from the general theoretical considerations, is discussed with relation to data taken from the feedback sessions.