DRAFT--SurveyGold
I
use SurveyGold software (www.surveygold.com/)
to create online surveys for Information Department clients in
Extension and CAHNRS. If you would like a survey, please note that
the software does not have unlimited flexibility. The following
page will give some guidelines that will help your survey be executed
efficiently and expeditiously.
Check
with me first to be sure that I can accommodate your survey
request.
If
this needs to go through a committee, superiors, IRB, partner
organizations, do this first to refine your questions and make
sure the survey is complete and approved before I begin work.
With
every question, note whether the question is required or optional.
For
questions with multiple options, note whether the question
is multiple choice (check boxes) or select
one (radio buttons).
I prefer the bare minimum of formatting. Place answer options
on separate lines, but do not use indenting, bullets, radio buttons,
etc.
In
addition to radio buttons and check boxes (with the option of
a single open-ended text response per question), SurveyGold accommodates
text answers (single line and multiple line), Likert
scale, and threading (skip to question) on the same page.
SurveyGold
cannot enforce ranking of items. For example: On a scale of one to six, list your preference of the following six colors:
Black
White
Yellow
Red
Green
Blue
SurveyGold
does not have the capability to prevent someone from giving each
color a rank of "1." Only have this type of question
if you are willing to accept the chance of error or misuse.
SurveyGold
does not have the capability to create paired responses. The following
configuration, for example, is not possible:
List
your preferred color and size of the following clothing items:
Clothing Item
Color
Size
Hat
Shoe
Pants
Shirt
Instead,
you would need to ask the color and size as separate questions:
What
size hat do you prefer?
What
color hat do you prefer?
Receiving Your Draft
After
I build your survey with SurveyGold, I will export it at an HTML
page, and you will see receive page to review. It is important
for you to look for methodological flaws (your own mistakes or
oversights), and implementation errors on my part (missing questions
or answers, for instance).
The draft survey may come with some things you did not anticipate,
such as extraneous section headers and undesired text formatting. Do
not comment on such items yet. They are the result of
SurveyGold requirements, and you will have a chance to comment
on them when you receive the final draft (after methodological
flaws and implementation errors have been corrected).
Also,
the questions in the HTML survey may not be numbered the same
way as in your draft survey. A series of questions that were
all considered part of one question in the draft, for instance,
may each have a number in the HTML survey. This is a function
of SurveyGold, and cannot be changed.
