Setting up surveys



Setting up surveys

In a way very similar to the way that report and report templates offer users to reuse reports for many different clients, questionnaire offers a very similar flexibility.

To create a questionnaire that can be answered by respondents, you will need both a questionnaire template and a questionnaire. The questionnaire template is the basic setup of questions, properties and conditions. In the template editor you basically decide on which questions come in which order and how answering certain questions in a certain way will decide on which questions you will be asked to answer after that.

But in order to create the actual survey process you need to add a questionnaire to the template. Related to this questionnaire you can setup a number of survey specific information and processes. This makes it possible to use the same template for different instances of surveying and still ensure they are different.

The things that will be the same for all questionnaires using the same template will be the things set up in the template editor; namely

Questions: Questionnaires consist of a number of different questions of varying types, like single, multi, text, numeric, and so on.

Properties: Each question can have properties defining things like allowed answer, requirements, available buttons and much more.

Conditions: Depending on what users answer in one question they may be excluded from other questions or some answer options may not be relevant. This logic can be controlled by conditions.

CGScript: When you want your questionnaires to do more advanced things like send e-mails, generate new users, update user information of database, send respondents between questionnaires, generate tasks, do advanced data management, and much more, you must learn CGScript -a unique Catglobe language!

The things that may differ between questionnaires, and which are specifically set up for instances of surveying are;

Samples: Before you can carry out a questionnaire, you need to specify who should be the respondents!

Question groups: You can define groups of questions to be rotated or randomly asked.

Coding: The coding module makes it possible to convert open type questions to closed questions. This is often necessary to report on the received data in a meaningful way.

CATI: There are a number of things you must do to enable a questionnaire for computer aided telephone interviewing (CATI).

Statistics: This tool helps you understand how well a survey has gone or is performing.

Move respondents wizard: Often you will want to use all respondents from one questionnaire in another questionnaire. This tool is in reality an additional sample builder tool.

Paper questionnaires: There are a number of things you must specify for a questionnaire in order to use it in paper format.

Hall test: This is a way in which you can synchronize laptops with a server, thus transferring questionnaires to the laptops and the answer sheets gathered from the laptops back to the server. This is a useful feature when sending out interviewers to collect data on location using laptops.

Recurring links and test links: Instead of making samples you can also create a link that will itself generate answer sheets once clicked. You can also use test links to try out your questionnaire without having a sample.

Quotas and stratification: Make sure you get a representative data material by managing needed quotas and closing sample groups when related quotas have been reached.

Questionnaire layouts: Decides how your questionnaire is set up graphically.

There are also some additional tools that work independently from the above segregation and can be accessed from both lists of from questionnaire list only. These are:

Constants: Often there will be things in your template that need to be different between questionnaires. This may for example be names or numbers. You can make an interactive setup between questionnaires and templates by specifying constant place holders in the template and then defining what they will be replaced by for any specific questionnaire. This makes the reusability of templates even more enticing!

Filter viewer: This tool makes it easy to get a clear picture of the way that conditions and properties are used throughout a questionnaire. This may be hard to survey when only having access to the questionnaire editor.

CGScript prompt: The CGScript prompt makes it possible to immediately influence the data of a questionnaire with a variety of commands.

Questionnaire translator module: This tool is a 'translator-friendly' interface for taking responsibility for translating questionnaires to different languages.

Now that you have a general idea of the features that are available let us start by making a questionnaire. First we need to go to the questionnaire list.