About Surveys

In a Psychology of Gender class, my group did a study on gender preferences in relation to desirable characteristics of the other gender. Qualtrics online survey software allowed us to create gender subgroups and analyze how males and females answered each question differently. The subgroups allowed us to find out which characteristics are more desirable for each gender. Graphs and tables are easily created for each subgroup with Qualtrics online survey software.

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.

Determining what customers want and determining the trade-offs they are willing to make can be very useful information for a company to have.   Conjoint Analysis is a statistical technique that allows you to quantitatively assess the relative importance of individual components of a product or a marketing strategy.  It magnifies the joint effects of mulitiple product characteristics.  It can predict the customer switch rate from one product to another.  It can predict the reaction to new strategies and products.  It can predict the customer response to alternative pricing strategies.  It is a great tool that aids in decision making. 

Conjoint analysis starts off with a survey of the customer base you are targeting.  Qualtrics.com has conjoint functionality with a template that really makes easy the process of putting a conjoint survey together.  It is under their "advanced elements" option.  An example of a basic scenario in which this technique would be helpful follows:

A marketing manager of a athletic shorts company wants to get a better understanding of the trade-offs their customers are willing to make and their happiness level associated with those trade-offs.

They determine four factors they feel are important with different attributes within each factor:

Short Color: Red, Blue, Black

Price: $15, $20, $25

Inseam Length: 14 inches, 18 inches, 20 inches 

Pockets: Pockets, No Pockets

The survey will ask questions about the importance of these different factors to the individual customers.  The questions will ask how much more important one factor is than another. 

The actual analysis of the a conjoint study is difficult, but valuable.  It provides beneficial intelligence about the best interactions of product factors and want customers want.   There are programs that can aid in the analysis (SPSS, SAS, Qualtrics, etc.) and this is probably the best route to take. 

Dichotomous Format - A test or survey item that offers two alternatives for each item (e.g. True/False).

Polytomous (Polychotomous) Format - A test or survey item with three or more alternative responses for each item (i.e. Multiple choice).

Likert Format - Item that would indicate the degree of agreement with a particular attitudinal question or statement (e.g. strongly disagree, disagree, neither disagree nor agree, agree, strongly agree).

Category Format - A rating scale format that uses a range of numbers or points (i.e. 1-10).

Checklists - A list of adjectives that delineate the characteristics of the person or topic.

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 am currently in a Business Writing class. We are doing a research paper and have been taught about primary and secondary information. One source of primary information we talked about was surveys. We talked about different question types you could use in your survey: multiple choice, open-ended text, likert scale, and rank order. We did not want to use paper surveys because it just seemed to be too much work. Online survey software was totally the way we wanted to go. We used Qualtrics survey software which has over 80 question types. You can upload graphics into your questions too. The qualtrics survey mailer is amazing. You can send out your survey to a group of people by using panels with people's email addresses in them. You can specify when you want to send the survey out and with custom messages. I think the best thing about it was how easy it was to use. It was really easy to create the survey and to send it out and also read the data. It allowed you to export the data into excel or word or powerpoint. It was such a great tool to use for research. To learn more about the survey tool, go to qualtrics.com.

A great way to visualize the satisfaction of your customers is by making a dashboard to display the results.  With xclesius, you can make a pretty cool dashboard that has drill-downs as well as some other neat components.  One reason these dashboards are perticular useful is because some managers and bosses might not understand certain statistics or cross-tabs, but they understand graphs and charts.  It makes communicating the results easy to understand.

We conducted our customer satisfaction survey through Qualtrics and from that we were easily able to load the data into excel.  Xcelsius is a program that takes the data from the excel book and gives you visuals.  At first, Xcelsius is kinda tough to figure out, but once you work with it a couple times, it you can become an expert and it really magnifies your findings.  And everyone who looks at the dashboard loves it.  You can really 'wow' people with a well put together dashboard.

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.