A couple of weeks ago I posted a survey to find out what people know about fire doors.  The purpose was to test my theory that the reason fire doors are improperly modified and damaged hardware is left unrepaired is because people don’t realize a) which doors are fire doors or b) what can or can’t be done to a fire door.  I originally developed this theory while I was creating a presentation about fire door inspection, and I wanted to have data to support it.

To date, I have received close to 700 responses to the survey.  According to our market research department, only 386 responses are needed to have 95% confidence + 5% precision (I found this statistic very interesting), so I feel good about the sampling represented by my data.  By the way, you can still take the survey if you’d like to.  My survey account allows me to have up to 1,000 responses per month so I’ve got a bit of remaining capacity for January.  Here’s a link to the post where you can access the survey.

There was one thing about the survey results that really surprised me.  All these years I’ve thought most people didn’t care much about doors, which is hard to believe since they’re so fascinating.  😉  What the survey showed was that most people intuitively know what the purpose of a fire door is even if they’ve never consciously thought much about them, and once the survey got them thinking about fire doors they wanted to know more!  For someone who is passionate about the door and hardware industry and teaching people about it, this was great news!

Many of the survey respondents included questions in their responses, or asked me to post the survey results.  So this begins a series of posts about the data I collected.  Before I begin though, I’d like to just state for the record that I’m not a professional survey-creator or a market research professional.  A few people commented that they didn’t like a couple of my questions.  I’m sorry!  I’m a hardware consultant!

I’d also like to thank everyone who took the time to respond to the survey.  I read each response to every question (phew!).  This was one of my favorite responses:

My next post will be about the purpose of fire doors (Q2), but to finish up this one, here is the breakdown of the respondents.
(The numbers may change slightly as the posts progress because I will use current data for that day.)

Read the next post about the survey results. –>

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