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Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Doing Surveys Online

Various ways of doing surveys online were discussed earlier this year on this blog. MMIC, Survey Gizmo and Lime Survey were all mentioned. MMIC™ (Multimode Interviewing Capability) is a comprehensive information system developed by the RAND Corporation. Survey Gizmo is similar to its competitor Survey Monkey, a package which people are most likely to be familar with. What makes Lime Survey different is that it is open-source, in other words completely free.

Recently, myself and Peter have been doing further research into different possibilities for doing surveys online. In particular, we wanted a package that would allow us to present feedback at the end of the survey, in a dashboard-type format, based on the answers provided by the survey repondent. We played around with various options, including:
(i) http://www.instantsurvey.com
(ii) http://www.vovici.com
(iii) http://www.mineful.com
(iv) http://www.keysurvey.com
(v) http://www.premiersurvey.com
(vi) http://www.zoomerang.com
(vii) http://www.unipark.info

However, our search came to an end when we found Qualtrics. As well as allowing a sophisticated feedback mechanism, Qualtrics has really useful "display option", "skip option" and randomisation features that can be used in the survey design. In the current survey-project that we have developed, we use the "display option" to ensure that a certain question only gets displayed if the respondent answers "Yes" to a previous (corresponding) question. In their own words, Qualtrics describe themselves as "easy enough for an intern and sophisticated enough for a Ph.D."

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