User's Manual

Smart Survey Design
Page 24
Interesting and good graphics are important elements in paper based surveys, but
an online survey can truly present well laid out and visually pleasing survey designs. Web
surveys can utilize colors, images, and hyperlinks. Web surveys are also dynamic, which
means they can provide statistical results on an immediate basis. Our tool provides
statistical results immediately in the Analyze section as soon as a respondent submits
his/her survey. In addition, the actual response time of participants is fairly quick for online
surveys that are delivered through email. Many people will answer the survey within few
days of receiving the email invite, and in some cases you will see a large number of
responses the day you send out the email invitation (Yun, G.W. and Trumbo, C.W 2006).
Another benefit of using email to collect responses is the ability to track your
respondents. You, the researcher, can track who has or has not responded and who has
declined. You can also track the email address or name associated with the individual
survey response (Sheehan, K. 2001). Our tool offers this advantage through the use of the
Email Invitation collector.
The online survey tool can administer skip logic techniques easier than a paper
based survey. This is done by routing respondents automatically to a page of follow-up
questions based on the answer choice they have selected. The logic is triggered in our tool
when a respondent clicks the “Next” button on the bottom of the page.
A final advantage of using online surveys is the use of “randomized answer
choices.” That is a premium feature for Professional subscribers in SurveyMonkey. Here
the survey can pull up the answer choices in a randomized order every time the link is
accessed by a new respondent. This may help in alleviating question choice bias, and to
deter the case where a person is simply clicking the first answer choice for every question
to quickly get through a survey.
Cons of Online Surveys:
We would like for you to be aware of the possible “cons” or issues that may arise
from implementing an online survey. People may feel that emailed surveys raise ethical
concerns and can be intrusive. Sending unsolicited emails (or too many emails) may
invade a person‟s privacy (Yun, G.W. and Trumbo, C.W., 2006). In response to this, we have
established a very strong privacy policy, and an anti-spamming agreement is established
when using the SurveyMonkey email to send out the invite messages.
To address the issue of intrusion, we have included the “opt out” or Remove Link
field in the email message that is delivered by SurveyMonkey. When a respondent clicks
on the remove link in an Email Invitation message, s/he is globally opted out of the lists in
the subscriber‟s account. The subscriber or account holder will not be able to add the opted