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Client

Y. Connie Yuan, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
email: ycycornell@gmail.com
telephone: 607-255-2603

Online Surveys

Objective

More social scientists now use the Internet to collect survey data. While many professional software packages are available for online data collection, few are user-friendly (including the package supported by CIT). The goal of this project is to develop a user-friendly software package for social scientists to collect survey data, including network data.

Requirements

The client suggests the following preliminary list of requirements:

Interface

1. Easy description of all anchor points of a scale (including the mid-point)

   In survey design, we need to provide clear descriptions about the scales for measurement, e.g., 1 = strongly disagree, 3 = neutral, 5 = strongly agree. Some software packages allow specification of the two end points of a scale only, and do not give us the option to add descriptions of other anchor points.

2. Add pictures on each page of the survey to make the interface more pleasant

   We want to be able to add some pictures on some pages of the survey to make it fun for survey respondents to answer our questions.

3. Respondents can enter login in ID to facilitate tracking of their responses

4. Simple URLs for the survey respondents

   In many situations, we only have respondents’ mailing addresses, not email addresses. As a result, we can only contact potential respondents via regular mails. Complicated URLs will be difficult for interested respondents to type out the correct address. For instance, we would prefer to use “surveyIOS.comm.cornell.edu” instead of “survey.comm.cornell.edu/%ein76wesda#ewaq?edq=edaedfae7”

5. The ability to use respondents’ earlier responses as input for later questions

   For instance, when studying social relationships among respondents, we will ask in the first question the names of the respondent’s friends. The names that the respondent has provided (e.g. Bill Arms, Connie Yuan, Jeff Hancock, etc.) will then be used as the input for the second question, e.g. how frequently do you talk to (a) Bill Arms, (b) Connie Yuan, and (c) Jeff Hancock each week about your term project?

1. Archive responses in Excel or text files so that we can later import the data into statistics packages for data analysis.

2. Save responses so that subjects can leave off the survey and come back again

The server can automatically save all legitimate entries that the respondents have provided so that the respondents do not have to re-start from the very beginning when they log into the system again.

3. Send out automatic reminders to those who have not finished the survey and direct them to where they left off the previous time.