By Ardi Kolah

Over the last 48 hours, senior sponsorship executives from 55 leading brand owners including adidas, Nike, BT, Barclays, LloydsTSB, Thomas Cook, Emirates, O2 and others received an invitation to take our short survey on their corporate social responsibility (CSR) and grass roots activities as part of their investments in sports sponsorship.

In broad terms, the survey explores the importance of CSR within the total marketing and communication mix, the underlying reasons for investing in CSR and grass roots activities, the impact on reputation and image of the brand owner and whether they measure outcomes as a result of these activities. We hope to survey the attitudes of all London 2012 sponsors at all levels plus those sponsors that spend the most in football, rugby, cricket and athletics.

I want to express our sincere thanks to Karen Earl, chairman of the European Sponsorship Association, Sally Hancock, Director, Olympic Marketing, Lloyds Banking Group, Mark Phillips, Head of Brand Marketing, adidas and marketing guru Peter Fisk who provided us with invaluable guidance and input regarding the survey at meetings we held with them about the research project over the past couple of weeks.

We are also delighted that Dr. Georgios Kavetsos, Research Fellow at the Faculty of Finance at Cass Business School has joined our team. Georgios is an economist and his doctorate previously looked into the impact the London 2012 Olympics announcement had on both the stock and property markets and the effect of hosting the Games on sports participation in Britain. The study we are conducting will have a strong economic and financial focus and having Georgios on the team ensures that we won’t leave any financial stone unturned!

The survey technique we are using at this stage of the CSR and sports sponsorship research project is called a Likert-type scale, named after its inventor, US business psychologist Professor Rensis Likert.

Part of the deliberations about the use of the Likert-type scale centred around the use of “neither agree nor disagree” as a choice for the respondent to a survey statement. There’s a question mark in academic thinking about what this response actually means in most cases – a view that I agree with.

And linked to this was a fascinating debate within our team about the merits of a five or seven point Likert scale!

One academic school of thought suggests that a Likert-type scale that allows for a neutral point makes people gravitate to it. Georgios recommended that we adopted a scale that was 7-point without a mid-point instead of the more regularly used 5-point with a mid point. And this is what we’ve adopted for this study.

And even the positive to negative or negative to positive order of the scale was debated in the early stages of the questionnaire construction, and it was decided to go with ‘Disagree Strongly’ being the lower number, and ‘Agree Strongly’ being the highest number on the sale.

We also decided that these two polar opposite responses would be the only anchor labels in the scale given that the Likert-type scale is supposed to be a continuous scale and so labeling each point is akin to a stepwise gradation and therefore risks distorting the research findings. In this way, respondents aren’t bound by the labels in the middle, and as a result the scale we are using is continuous. So no labels apart from the anchors!

So as you’ve just read, there’s more to ‘agreeing’ and ‘disagreeing’ than may think!