Poverty Law Surveys, v 1.0: Step-By-Step: Your Guide to Creating a Survey

Submitted by gabrielle on Sun, 09/17/2006 - 7:08pm.

How to Create a Survey with Poverty Law Survey Tool

This step-by-step guide covers the basic steps in creating a survey using the Poverty Law Surveys. Although there are other options in most of these steps, newbies will find this guide useful to get started and begin exploring the other features of the tool. As with any survey tool, it is important to have an idea of why and how you are going to create and implement the survey before getting started with creating a "real" survey. For more information, download the Poverty Law Survey Tool Help Guide (PDF). (See also FAQs for Using Poverty Law Survey Tool for information on sharing surveys, copying and exporting surveys, etc..)

Before you begin using the online tool, you should have created a document that has your questions and answers clearly organized and identified. The key things you'll want to know are:

How the questions are organized and in what order
Whether any of the questions conditional on other questions -- in other words, "If they answer yes to #15, then the survey should ask #16. But if they answer no, then just skip to #16."
The kinds of questions / answers -- for a listing of answer types, see A Primer on Question Types.

Once you have your questions organized, you'll create a survey using the Poverty Law Survey Tool.

PART I -- GETTING STARTED

1. Login to the Poverty Law Survey Tool. (http://survey.lstech.org)

2. New Survey. Create a new survey by clicking on the “New” Icon on the Admin Toolbar.

3. Fill in at least the Survey Title. Ideally you should finally fill in most of the fields relevant to your survey, but this can be done at a later stage as well. See PART 9.

4. Now click “Create Survey”.

PART II -- CREATING A GROUP.

Before you enter in your questions and answers, you need to create a Group. A Group is simply a set of questions grouped together. A Group has a name, and it titles the set of questions (e.g., Part 1: General Information). Every survey needs to have at least one GROUP within it. (Note: Questions can be shown to the viewer individually or by their grouping -- as in, all on one page.)

If your survey design is appropriate, you can divide your questions in as many logical groups as you like. However, even if your survey has only 2 questions in it, it needs to be within a group.

When you create a Group, consider that the Groups will be listed to the viewer alphabetically by its name (not by the order you created it). So, naming your Group is important. We suggest: "Part 1: General Information...Part 2: XXX". This will keep them in order.

1. New Group. The next step now is to create a new group by clicking on the “New” icon on the Survey Toolbar. In the screen that follows, name the group.

If you know how many groups you are going to create, simply repeat this process to create and name multiple groups. Once your groups are created, y you are ready to create your first question.

PART 3: QUESTIONS

There are a few key things you need to know before entering in and creating your questions. The Survey Tool database tracks your questions by a numeric value you give it. (It tracks the answers in the same way.) It's, well, very database-like. Again, the questions will appear in the order of their numeric codes, not in the order you type them.

Before you type in your question you want to show up on the survey, you need to assign a unique question code to it. A unique question code sounds ominous and can be confusing for non-statisticians, but, in fact, it is simply a code that correlates the questions with the responses in the data tables behind the tool. For your purposes, you simply can call it Q01 (for question 1).

Some tips on coding your questions. You have four digits within which to enter a number / code. We suggest that you code your questions as Q01, Q02, etc. If you finish the survey and realize you need a question in between questions 1 and 2, you can simply code a question Q01a.

1. Select the Group within which these questions will reside, then Create a new question by clicking on the New Question Icon.

2. Enter the unique question code. (See above.)

3. Type Question. Enter the question text in its field. You have an option to use a "Help" field. The Help field is optional. You can use it to give the respondent any assistance in understanding or responding to that question.

4. Choose Question Type. Choose the question type that is suitable for your question. If you need help understanding Question Types, see A Primer on Question Types

5. Click ADD QUESTION at bottom. Once you add the question, you will see the icon for answers on the screen. You may enter in your answers, or finish adding in all the questions first.

PART 5: ADDING ANSWERS.

If you have entered in all your questions, select the first question in your drop down. If you've entered one question, you should see the answer icon. (Note: The Answer icon only appears if you have ente

red a question that needs answers to be added. For example, it will not show up if the question is a Yes/No type.)

1. Notice the Answer Icon. You'll notice Clicking that icon will take you to the answer screen.

2. Enter your answer codes. Here you will be prompted to enter each answer option with a corresponding answer code (similar to question codes mentioned earlier). You can do A01, A02, etc.

3. Type or paste the answer text, then click ADD (to the R of the answer).

Word to the Wise: If you go back and want to change your answer, you can easily. But, you need to hit SAVE after EVERY answer change. In other words, say you have a list of four answers a - d. You want to change something in answers a - d. Edit a, then hit SAVE. Edit b, then hit SAVE. If you only hit SAVE at the end, it will only capture the very last edit.

4. Optional: Select the default answer. If you do not select which answer you want defaulted, the default will be "No Answer," which does not show up on the editing bar, but will show up on the survey.

PART 6: PREVIEWING THE SURVEY.

You can preview the survey at any point. Your responses will not be saved so long as the survey is not activated. Preview the survey until that point by clicking on the green “Do Survey” icon in the Survey Toolbar.

PART 7: CHANGES AND EDITS

If you need to edit a group, question, or answer, simply select the component in the drop down, and hit the EDIT icon.

PART 8: CONDITIONAL QUESTIONS and ANSWERS

Conditional questions sound fancy, but we use this in practice all the time. It is simply a feature that enables you to show certain questions only if previous answered matched a desired designation. An example is:

A. Do you like to eat dessert? Y / N

B. If Y, what is your favorite?

C. If N, skip to next question.

In an online survey, the database can set it up so that the viewer will see the following question or be routed to the next question

automatically. This is a conditional question. And, they are not difficult to do.

Once your questions and answers are entered:

1. Select the Question that has a condition. In our example, this would be "B. What is Your Favorite?" NOTE: I originally kept trying to make the main question the conditional question, but it doesn't work that way. If you're like me, think of it as the question AFTER the conditional one.

2.Click on the Conditional Question Icon (which looks like a branch of an organizational chart.)

3. Enter the Conditions. It asks you to enter when the selected question will be shown based on the answers of ANY prior question (not just the one immediately before it). Select the prior question, click on the answer which would need to be clicked in order to have this B. What is Your Favorite show up. Repeat as needed.

PART 9: REVIEWING THE SURVEY DESIGN

After completing the entire survey design and previewing it, you can then go back to the main administration page of your survey to finalize fields.

1. Return to the Administration page of the survey.

2. Enter in a Welcome message that viewers will see when they launch your survey.

Enter a Description if you want. (Keep it short because it appears across the top of every page under Name of Survey.)

4. Check the Administrator Contact Name and Email.

5. Select the Format: Question by Question is default, but if Group by Group lets people see how many questions they need to wade t

hrough in each section.

6. Pick a Template. I can't say I know what many of those are. You can pick one and preview it.

7. Skip Some Fields. Note: For Use Cookies, Notification, Anonymous, Email texts, and Public Registration, and Token Attribute

Names -- these are more sophisticated options. For information on what they mean and when to use them, view XXX.

8. Start / Expire -- You can leave it blank or enter a date.

9. Max Respondents -- Ditto to 8.

10. URL: The Survey Tool won't launch this page after the survey, but the link will show up on the final page of the survey.

11. Click UPDATE SURVEY.

12. VERY IMPORTANT -- PREVIEW IT ONE LAST TIME.

PART 10: ACTIVATE YOUR SURVEY. Remember that you cannot make substantial changes to the survey structure once you activate your survey. Also, you cannot retrieve your responses if you deactivate the survey after people have answered it. So, remember to export your responses before you deactivate your survey.

1. Activate.