Surveys Online

Three may not be a magic number, but if three people independently ask for help with surveys, you can be pretty sure that there are many people who want to make surveys.

The problem with surveys is that there are TOO MANY ways to do them. (In this regard, think of all the Calendaring systems: Meetingmaker, Outlook, iCal, Palm Calendars, Sundial, Google and Yahoo Calendars, even your Fridge--all work well, but not well with EACH OTHER, and you need everyone you know to use the same Calendar to really benefit.) Surveys are more useful, when they are all done in the same way, so that you can change them without learning a new piece of software, and you can analyze the results in the same way--even compare the results--without trying to move between all the different survey tools you are using. With this caveat--its not worth having yet another survey tool if you already have a whole workflow in place for your teaching and research--I am going to recommend a survey tool, which might become your ONE survey tool.


Zoomerang (http://www.zoomerang.com)

Anyone can get a free account and survey up the 50 people with any one survey, creating address books of the respondents you email it to, etc. You can even analyze the results online with some helpful tools (though not export the data in a spreadsheet) so it is an excellent tool to give to students, who want to make small surveys for an assignment, or even a tool for you to survey them. Creating a survey takes minutes: you just go online, pick the type of questions (multiple choice, yes/no, open answer, closed answers, but with follow ups, etc.), create the options, and publish it to a list of emails, or to a web address online. This is a screenshot of how the surveys look when complete.

For $99 a quarter (3 months) or $350 a year you can have a full fledged account, (which can even be branded with Human Biology or your lab logo) and has no limit on the number of respondents, nor limits on exporting the data. You can't share your account, so everyone in Humbio can't use one account, but this doesn't mean you can't delegate a graduate student to set these up for you. Its just that more than one person cannot be doing this at the same time--literally, the interface wiil not allow two different people to log on to it at the same time with the same account and password. I wrote them to ask about this and educational pricing, and I am linking this to the complete letter so you can read the details yourself