The Benefits of Online Surveys
May 14th, 2008Online 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.