About Surveys

Automating processes is the new assembly line of the twenty first century.  Using computers and machines we take simple mind numbing tasks that humans dislike doing over and over again and we do them automatically with little or no human intervention.  When we automate surveys by programming them and putting them online we eliminate the need for humans to administer these surveys.  This decreases costs and increases accuracy for the data collected. 

While you will always find bias, for an online survey which is automated it is easier keep it unbiased.  This is because there is nobody actually giving the survey who could possibly allow their biases (even subconsciously) to affect the respondents.  Each survey will be presented in exactly the same way for each respondent.  The randomization of questions, answers or whole question scenarios becomes a breeze.   And the good part is that it has become very easy to make these surveys.  You no longer need to know how to do computer programming to make them.  These automated online surveys can be made online from a variety of companies (I suggest Qualtrics) in a very short time.

Hurray for modern technology!

Often when working online, you are in need of a spell-check feature. Let's face it, if you're like me, a spell-check feature comes in handy when you're typing faster than you're thinking. I create a lot of surveys and I've found, thankfully, there are some very simple options that are very helpful when creating survey questions. 

The latest versions of Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari browsers both provide built-in spell-check features. If you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, then you can install a simple add-on that will accomplish this for you (IE7Pro and ieSpell both provide a nice option for spell checking as well as instructions on how to use them).Now, any time you are entering text for a survey question, you will see the red underline when you have a questionable spelling. Hopefully you find these alternatives as helpful as I do!

Online surveys are no doubt the best way to do surveys. I was doing a survey for a project in my marketing class.  I proof read it and then I had some of my team mates proof read it.  It all looked good when we sent it out to our panel, but the next day I got an email from one of our respondents who Notified me that there were a couple of spelling errors (really embarrassing ones) in our survey.  Now in a paper survey there would have been no hope.  Reprinting and redistributing 50 or so surveys that had not yet been taken wouldn’t have been possible.  But because it was an online survey we were able to correct the errors in a less than a minute, and no one who hadn’t already seen the survey ever knew the difference. 

 Later that same year in my Economics class we were doing another survey to determine a demand curve.  About mid survey I was looking at the data, as it was being collected in real time, (which by its self is reason enough to use online surveys), when I noticed that one of our questions was not the correct question type to get us the data we needed.  The question was collecting what peoples preferences where but respondents were not ranking their preferences as we needed.  No problem I simply changed the question mid stream and we moved onward with survey, this time getting the data that we needed. 

This is the big benefit of online surveys.  You can see the results in real time and you can fix any errors in real time.  Online surveys are just so much more flexible and resilient than are paper surveys. 

While conducting survey research, most academic and private sector organizations will adhere to the code of ethics and practices established by the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). This code calls for honesty, respect, and integrity in dealing with respondents, clients, and the public.

In this code of ethics, respondents should be given the content, sponsorship, and purpose of the survey so that they may make an informed judgment about whether they wish to participate. Any assurances, such as confidentiality or anonymity, must also be kept by the researcher.

Additionally, researchers are called to disclose fully to those who sponsor surveys the limitations and shortcomings of the survey and to avoid use of methods that deliberately introduce bias into the results. A survey report should include information on who sponsored it, who conducted it, exact wording and sequencing of questions, description of the population and how a sample was selected, sample sizes and sampling tolerance, and the method place and dates of data collection.

This information is seldom available in published research reports or media summaries, but should be obtainable with a phone call or letter to the sponsor of the survey. Today, online survey software has made this process of gathering the ethical information extremely easy. With a good survey software program, one can provide the relevant information and adhere to the code of ethics and practices with ease.

With W-2's, 1099-T's, and 1040s we come to truly appreciate our beloved tax bureaucracy, the IRS. Tis the season for paying taxes. With the passage of April 15th, I once again am grateful for little tools that help me prepare, the barely legible tax forms. I personally use H&R Block for my taxes, but my brother uses Turbotax, both cost about the same. Yet, this tax season I was truly inspired by an accounting companies ingenuity. They used Qualtrics, to import the tax forms and sent the forms to their employees. Brilliance!

I actually was able to help them import one of their forms regarding research and development, it was about 10 pages long and only took me about an hour to import streamlining the whole process. I imagine that the hour I spent uploading this form saved their accountants a lot of time. Corporate taxes are much more complex than personal taxes, hence the need for a good CFO, but I was amazed at how Qualtrics was able to integrate and organize their data. I've been thinking about this myself and I might just  steal this idea for my personal taxes next year.

I am a college student who has needed to perform surveys for research. I found that online surveys work most effectively. The data is collected for you automatically. All you need to do is create the survey and analyze the results. Regular paper surveys are a pain because you have to go through each survey and manually extract all the data. The only problem I came across using online surveys was having people actually respond to the survey. But, I do know that some online survey software companies, like Qualtrics, can put you in touch with panel companies which will help you get as many respondents as you need. This works well for businesses doing market research or schools doing field research. For example if you wanted to do a survey about doctors, the panel company would set up a panel of 100 doctors (or however many you needed) and they would all take your survey.

Not long ago, I participated in a research group for a psychology class at BYU. We wanted to survey as many people as possible, but weren't interested in printing off a bunch of surveys and handing them out. We decided to use an online survey software we found at Qualtrics.com in order to create our survey. Their online survey software has an option available to ensure that people only take the survey once (to prevent response inflation) and it also does basic data analysis, or allows data export to SPSS or excel for more in depth analysis. It was much easier doing it that way than tediously entering all of the data into SPSS cell by cell ourselves.

I have recently made and distributed a series of surveys for my marketing classes and Economics classes in the Marriott School of Management. The school has a license agreement with Qualtrics which allows students and faculty to use Qualtrics’ on line survey software to build and distribute surveys. This survey tool is largely unknown, by both students and professionals in the field. I don’t expect this to continue for long.

The Qualtrics survey software is one of the most useful business tools I have seen, I would put it right close up there with Excel and Word. The array of question types was dazzling. They had the most commonly used question types twelve or so neatly organized and easy to find. They where so easy to add into the survey and to add question and answer text was a breeze. It literally took me just a minute to put in several questions. If fact the vast majority of my time was spent planning what exactly I needed to ask in order to get the data needed. Once I knew what I needed to ask, building the survey took almost no time in comparison.

But the time saving didn’t stop there. I could view the results in real time as they came in. The basic statistics where already calculated for me and reported in tables for each question. I discovered I could put in and take out the different calculations in these tables. I could also add different graph types to more visually show the results. I found that I could also drill down by the answers to certain questions, showing how those of ethnic Mexican decent responded in one way to survey while other ethnicities had different responses. I was then able to make my report public, which generated a link I sent to my group so they could go over the results before we met to discuss it. If we had wanted we could have talked over the phone while each of us looked at the results on our computers. I also found I could down load these reports into word, power point, or excel.

I have played with the system a bit and you can even down load the raw data in to excel or to SPSS to do the more serious statistical analysis. There are all sorts of other features, quotas, Skip logic, Conjoint analysis, etc. . . .

On top of all this the surveys I sent out were very sexy. It looked great! I had class mates emailing me asking how we were able to make such incredible surveys. I’m sure they thought that we had a team member who was minoring in computer science.

To my understanding Qualtrics now provides their online survey software to many universities across the U.S. and even internationally. USC, Columbia, Duke, Texas University, Texas A&M, Yale, Stanford UCLA, Bristol, University of Michigan, North Western University, Wharton College of Business, and on the business side Mercer, Royal Caribbean, Daimon, Toyota, HP, and Even Microsoft use Qualtrics online survey software.

The easy, power, and usefulness of this online survey tool dwarf any of their competitors.

By Scott M. Smith Ph.D.

How do you Increase online survey response rates? Survey response rates are a function of the

1. Clarity of instructions, purpose and questions
2. Motivation of the respondent to respond
3. Interest of the respondent in the survey
4. Survey length and ease of completing the survey
5. Incentives and rewards for completion

The Theory behind ìHow to Increase Survey Response Rates:
Why do people participate as respondents in a survey?

The question often asked by marketing researchers is how to increase online survey response rates. Evangelista, Albaum and Poon (1999) investigated four behavior theories of motivation that can be developed into specific techniques (including inducements) for increasing online survey response rates. The following theories are among those that have been proposed (and studied to varying degrees) as answers to this question. (This overview has been abstracted and edited with permission of Evangelista, F., Albaum, G., & Poon, P. (1999, April). An empirical test of alternative theories of survey response behavior. Journal of the Market Research Society, 41, 2, 227ñ244. )

Using Exchange and Incentives to Increase Online Survey Response Rates

The process of using survey techniques to obtain information from potential respondents can be viewed as a special case of social exchange. Very simply, social exchange theory asserts that the actions of individuals are motivated by the return (or rewards) these actions are expected to, or usually do, bring from others.

Whether a given behavior occurs is a function of the perceived costs of completing a survey and the rewards (not necessarily monetary) one expects to receive as a result of completing the survey.

Under this theory, survey response rate is increased by meeting three conditions:

1. The costs for survey response must be minimized.
2. The rewards for survey response must be maximized.
3. There must be a belief by potential respondents that such rewards will, in fact, be provided.

Larger incentives for survey completion will generally produce larger response rates. These incentives are often offered in the form of random drawings or incentives to the first 100 respondents to the survey. Respondents generally do not understand the probabilities of winning and like the case of lotteries, respond better to the change of a very attractive incentive. Incentives distributed as drawings allow the researcher to control the costs of the survey and spread the budgeted amount across a large number of respondents.

Using Cognitive Dissonance to Increase Online Survey Response Rates

Cognitive dissonance theory when applied to increasing survey response, integrates a broad range of research efforts on inducement techniques for survey response. As used to explain survey response, the theory postulates that reducing dissonance is an important component of the "respond/not respond" decision by potential survey respondents.

The process is triggered by receipt of a questionnaire and cover letter asking for participation. Assuming that failure to respond might be inconsistent with a person's self-perception of being a helpful person, or perhaps at least one who honors reasonable requests, failure to respond will produce a state of dissonance that the potential respondent seeks to reduce by becoming a survey respondent.

Since the decision to participate in an online survey involves a series of decisions for some people, delaying the ultimate decision may be a way to avoid completing the questionnaire without having to reject the request outright (and thus experience dissonance). Delaying a decision, therefore, may in itself be a dissonance-reducing response.

Using Self-Perception to Increase Online Survey Response Rates

Self-perception theory asserts that people infer attitudes and knowledge of themselves through interpretations made about the causes of their behavior.

Interpretations are made on the basis of self-observation. To the extent that a person's decision to respond to a survey is attributed to internal causes and is not perceived as due to circumstantial pressures, a positive attitude toward survey response develops.

These attitudes (self-perception) then affect subsequent behavior. The self-perception paradigm has been extended to the broad issue of online survey response. To increase the precision of this paradigm, the concepts of salience (importance of behaviors one has attended to), favorability (the affect or feeling generated by a given behavioral experience), and availability (information in memory) are utilized.

In addition, researchers should create labels (i.e., helpful, kind, generous) to enhance the effects of online survey response. Labeling involves assisting the prospective respondents to classify themselves based on their behavior such that they will act in a manner consistent with the characterization.

Self-perception would predict that using an invitation letter to label behavior as "helpful" would cause that person to view himself or herself as the kind of person who engages in such behavior; therefore, the likelihood of later label consistent behavior is increased.

Using Commitment and Involvement to Increase Online Survey Response Rates

Increasing online response rate may be a function of the range of allegiance an individual has for any system of which he or she is a member. Consistent behavior based on commitment and involvement requires that the respondent:

1. Has been involved or committed over some period of time
2. Has been involved or committed to the pursuit of at least one common goal
3. Rejects other acts of behavior inconsistent with an involved or committed individual.

Consequently, the major elements of commitment are most likely to increase online response rates when the respondent recognizes that they:

1. His or her decision to respond to an online survey has consequences for other interests and activities not necessarily related to it.
2. The person is in a position to respond by merit of his or her own prior behavior.
3. The potential respondent, as committed person, must recognize the invitation to respond to the survey is a result of their prior action (membership or involvement), and realize that their response is necessary.

Online response rates for individuals highly committed and involved with the survey sponsor are much less likely to terminate the survey than those who is uncommitted.

The theory of commitment (or involvement), as extended to increase survey response rates, indicates that we may attach commitment to many different aspects of a survey, such as:

• the source or the sponsor
• the researcher
• the topic and issues being studied
• the research process itself

To a large extent, commitment is manifested by interest in what is being asked of the potential respondent.

Evangelista, Albaum and Poon found that Commitment/Involvement and Economic Incentives were most effective in increasing survey response rates. Our experience over thousands of surveys echoes this finding.

Other Considerations That May Be Used To Increase Online Survey Response Rates
When designing a survey that maximizes survey response rate, the researcher must consider issues that can affect response rate and data quality, including:

ï Clarity of instructions, purpose and questions
ï Preliminary notification
ï Time required of respondent
ï Use of inducements
ï Open coding of responses
ï Identification of sponsor and source
ï Follow-up policy
ï Questionnaire (measurement instrument) design
ï When to contact respondents
ï Type of appeal to use
ï Potential respondents interest and commitment to the topic and/or study
ï Others unique to a specific technique of data collection (e.g., text only or text and graphics in the survey)

The final point of increasing response rates for online survey is the need for pre-testing the survey. By conducting a pretest, you can:

• Identify problematic questions and rewrite them
• Identify problem points within the survey through discontinuation rates
• Identify points of confusion
• Estimate the real cost of data collection
• Estimate the response rate and thus obtain a better estimate of list size and the associated resulting sample size
• Estimate the distribution of responses to key research questions

Pre-testing allows for optimization and testing of preliminary notification letters, incentives, follow-up letters and invitations, and types of appeals to be used.

Scott Smith is the founder of Qualtrics.com. He is the James Passey Professor of Marketing and Director of the Institute of Marketing at Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. in Marketing and Quantitative Methods from Pennsylvania State University.

By Stuart Orgill

Many companies decide to begin online survey software initiatives to make better business decisions in a variety of areas. Implementing online survey software can:

1. Hedge a company's decision making process.
2. Save money on out-sourced projects.
3. Allow more control over the surveys being distributed.

Once the survey process is brought in-house there are many other benefits that soon surface.

When a company begins an internal survey process, one of the first steps is to establish the frequency at which the team or individual will send out surveys. A natural pattern for survey distribution eliminates the long, punishing surveys that were previously sent to clients a few times per year.

In their place one can institute shorter, more efficient surveys with "bite size" data sets that are more actionable. With regular surveys there is the comfort of knowing that "you can always survey again next month" and obtain more actionable information. This drives down the data response time, and the company becomes more nimble.

Respondents to the surveys will also benefit. Stephen Covey has mentioned before that being listened to is like breathing emotionally. When clients are able to share their insights with the company they feel like they are being "heard."

Studies have shown that even those internal or external clients who don't respond to the survey benefit emotionally by knowing that the company is listening.