Post-Survey Programming Steps

One of the best things about survey software is how easy they make it to create surveys. You can click a few buttons, create your survey, and voila – the survey is ready to go. It’s the ease of these software platforms, like SurveyMethods that make them such popular choices for research.

But with that in mind, you still do not want to go from creating the survey to fielding the survey right away. There are steps that every researcher should take before they put out the survey to their sample. These include: “Breaking” The Survey Once you’ve created the survey, it’s time to “break” it.

This is when you have dozens of people fill out the survey dozens of time and do anything they can to cause the survey to skip important questions, miss answers, etc. This is how you test things like skip logic or problems with how you programmed answers, have people look for spelling errors, or issues with imported data. Try to have everyone do whatever it takes to find ways to make the survey not work.

If they can’t, that implies you created it correctly. Testing the Dataset You can collect all of the data you want, but that doesn’t mean that you’ve created the dataset correctly. That’s why you should field the survey with people in your office and have them take it multiple times again.

Then look at the data and make sure that it’s exactly what you expected. Analyze the fake data, and make sure that you have all of the data you need to run these analyses. Field a Smaller Survey As long as it’s financially viable, it’s not a bad idea to field a smaller study and then ask for feedback from your sample.

This way you can get real data, start looking at what the answers look like from those that know nothing about the survey, and possibly get a better idea of how the survey looks and feels to those that are actually going to take it.

Your survey is too important to take any risks. That’s why even if your survey is ready, and you trust in your ability to create a great survey with no errors using quality survey software, it’s still a great idea to test, test, and test some more. The more you test, the more likely you are to catch any errors before the survey is out and ensure that it will work for you.