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Personalized Survey Design

In my last post, I talked about personalized medicine. I found out this week that in personalized medicine, there is a distinction between targeted and tailored treatments. Targeted treatments are aimed at specified subgroups of the population, while tailored protocols are individual-specific treatments that may be based in a targeted treatment, but use within-patient variation to "tune" treatments over time.

I wonder if the kind of tailored protocols suggested by this kind of tailoring are possible for surveys? Panel surveys are one area where this may be possible. But it seems that the panel would have to have many waves or repetitions. There might not be enough measurement of variation with only a few waves. What's a few? Let's say fewer than 10 or 20.

It seems like these methods might have an application in surveys that use frequent measurement and/or a relatively long period of time. For example, imagine a survey that collected data weekly for 2 or 3 years. Or daily for 2 or 3 months. Perhaps in these settings, there is enough within-person variation to learn some things that might allow "personalization" of the protocol.
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  1. junaid rahmanAugust 20, 2015 at 7:14 AM

    Questionnaire designing is not an easy task, as it may seem so. This article tries to discuss three mistakes generally committed by the survey research questionnaire designers. survey design

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