Research Tips
DIY Web Surveys
Many companies offer products that enable people to create their own Web surveys with online applications or “off the shelf” software. These products tend to be inexpensive and can be a good option in some situations, but they can lead to problems in other situations.
DIY surveys are a good option when you only need to ask a few questions and when the person creating the survey has at least some research knowledge; however, some things to be aware of are:
- The value derived from a survey is very much dependent on the quality of the questions and the quality of the analysis. As discussed in many of our other tips, relatively subtle changes in things like question wording can have a big effect on interpretation, and analysis of survey data is also subject to a variety of nuances.
- While many of the DIY products make it possible to use skip patterns and other advanced techniques, people who are unfamiliar with these techniques and / or the particular software can easily make mistakes resulting in respondents not being asked some questions which they should be asked or being asked questions which they shouldn’t.
- The Web browser and version a respondent uses may affect how survey questions look and even how they function. While the companies that create the Web survey products should have done testing to accommodate this, they don’t test every survey with every browser so people doing DIY surveys should run their own tests — particularly if respondents are likely to be using a wide variety of browsers and browser versions.
- While most DIY products do offer features which provide some degree of customization and flexibility, they can’t accommodate every type of question a researcher might wish to use. Only custom programming can do that.