Online Surveys

From AoirWiki

This is an attempt to distill answers to a common question on the AIR-L list: What is the best online survey system to use? I encourage others to expand the following to include capabilities, experiences, and best practices.

Contents 1 BIRAT 2 LimeSurvey (self-hosted) 3 PollMaker (self-hosted) 4 Psychedata 5 SurveyGizmo 6 Survey Monkey 7 SurveyPro 8 UniPark 9 Other Guides to Online Surveys 10 Related Articles

BIRAT

http://birat.net

Charlie Balch recommends this system, created for his dissertation.

From the site: Welcome to BIRAT. This site provides tools to create and analyze online survey instruments. Most item types are supported and the data is organized so that you can export it for further analysis with tools like Excel and SPSS. While BIRAT is fully functional, it is also under development. Please visit from time-to-time to see what has been added.

LimeSurvey (self-hosted)

http://www.limesurvey.org/

From the site: "To cut a very long story short: LimeSurvey has a lot of features. LimeSurvey basically contains everything you need for doing nearly every survey with grace. What is still missing will most likely be found on our rapidly shrinking roadmap."

Derek Lackaff notes: "I’m currently piloting a project with the open-source LimeSurvey (formerly PHPSurveyor). Very fast survey setup, lots or pre-defined question types, many security options. It’s not a hosted service—user hosts it herself—but setup is simple."

PollMaker (self-hosted)

http://www.pollmaker.com/

Pollmaker appears to be a free piece of software you can host locally--however, their website is broken at the moment.

Homero Gil de Zuniga writes: "Keith, you might want to check PollDesigner software. It's free and if you don't manage HTML or XHTML coding it will help you a lot."

Psychedata

http://www.psychdata.com/

Natalie Lupton notes: "I have used Psychdata to collect my dissertation research data. They have proven to be very reliable and fairly inexpensive, although I have a small sample size."

Pricing has several variables, but appears to be in the $500 range to mount a survey.

From the site: "Conduct your research using our superior IRB-preferred services that are uniquely engineered to protect the integrity of your work and the security of your data."

SurveyGizmo

http://www.surveygizmo.com/

From the site: " SurveyGizmo is a creative platform for any marketing, lead generation or research project. Create surveys, landing pages, polls, quizzes, contact forms, ticketing queues and mobile marketing campaigns. Whatever data you need, we can help you get it."

One form of account is priced at $15 a month for 1000 responses a month.

Nancy Baym: "I have been using SurveyGizmo and am very happy with it. It's got a nice variety of pricing levels depending on how many responses you expect to get, and the customer support has been fabulous."

Survey Monkey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

Survey Monkey is the most frequently mentioned web-based survey system on AIR-L, and many researchers have posted to AIR-L singing its praises. It's been around a while, and seems to work well. Pricing is currently $19.95 a month for up to 1000 responses monthly.

Doreen Starke-Meyerring: "I have used SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com). I found it to be very easy and user-friendly and does everything you are asking for; I think it cost about 20/ month. For up to 10 questions and fewer than 100 respondents, it's free, so you can try it out for a smaller project. What was nice about it was that all your data stay there even when you discontinue paying the monthly fee. You can decide to restart your account any time."

SurveyPro

http://www.surveypro.com/

Elisabeth Deutskens suggests this one. It appears that the least expensive pricing at the moment is $499 for a three month <1000 response survey.

UniPark

http://www.unipark.info/

Joachim Schroer suggests that "we've been using UniPark for a couple of years now and are very satisfied with it (pricing is tailored to university budgets)."

From the site: "Scientific research departments, professorships and individuals in the academic field can now subscribe to Globalpark’s high-end online survey software Surveycenter at greatly reduced costs. Surveycenter is the online research tool of choice for over 300 businesses worldwide. Its friendly web-based interface allows users to create high quality surveys with minimal effort."

Other Guides to Online Surveys

• Joachim Schroer suggests Websm

• assignment help

• Yanuar Nugroho suggests a JCMC article (from 2005).

• You may also want to look through the posts to AIR-L containing the keyword "online survey": [1] dissertation help

Related Articles

These references suggested by Porsche VanBrocklin-Fischer:

• Best, S. J., and Kruger, B. S. (2004). Internet Data Collection. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Baker, LC, M. Kate Bundorf, Sara Singer, and Todd H. Wagner. 2003. “Validity of the Survey of Health and Internet and Knowledge Network’s Panel and Sampling”. Stanford, CA: Stanford University; 2003.
• Couper, Mick P., Michael W. Traugott, and Mark J. Lamais. 2001. “Web survey design and administration”. Public Opinion Quarterly. 65 (2): 230 (24).
• Dillman, Don, A. 2000. Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method. NY, NY: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Evans, Joel R. and Anil Mathur. 2005. “The Value of Online Surveys”. Internet Research. 15(2):195-219.

Yanuar Nugroho suggests:

• Burke, LA. and KE. James (2006), Using online surveys for primary research data collection: lessons from the field, International Journal of Innovation and Learning, Volume 3, Number 1/2006, pp.16-30