
About the Library

Moore Library News

Latest

Quick Tips for Survey Design via Qualtrics

by Kimberley Barker on 2019-04-08T14:17:00-04:00 | Comments

 

This article was written by David Martin, with editing by Kimberley Barker.

Do you need to design a survey? Then look no further than Qualtrics at UVA. Qualtrics provides survey research capabilities to faculty, staff, and students, and allows users to create multiple types of questions, use logic and validation, and distribute surveys to a multitude of participants. Here within the Data Services department (Data @ HSL) at the Health Sciences Library, David Martin has experience creating and analyzing Qualtrics surveys and he has a few tips for designing easy-to-use and easy-to-analyze surveys. When creating a survey using Qualtrics, keep these three things in mind:

1. Keep it Simple

Although there are many different and complicated types of questions you can create in Qualtrics, sometimes the most effective and easy-to-analyze questions are multiple choice questions. Multiple choice questions may seem dull, but they are easy to follow, easy to create, and much simpler to analyze than their more fancy cousins. Even something as simple as a free text question is fraught with possible errors and oversights, and can be quite difficult to analyze.

2. Be Logical

                When you are creating a survey, organize your survey in a logical way. It does not make sense to have a physician answer questions that are only relevant to nurses, and vice versa. Using “Display” and “Skip” logic within Qualtrics allows you to show certain questions to specific participants, or to skip over questions if previous questions are answered in a particular way. Constructing a flowchart of how different types of participants work through the survey goes a long way towards building a logical survey.

3. Test, Test, Test

                Finally, once you have created your survey, test it multiple times on multiple participants. Enlist coworkers, family members, and acquaintances, and encourage them to try to break the survey. This will allow you to both find the flaws in your design and to preview what the results will look like, providing you with an idea of how to plan your analysis. One nice option in Qualtrics is the “Generate Test Responses” feature, which allows you to create hundreds or thousands of automated responses that will randomly select different answers within your survey.

 

These are just a few tips on how to create a useful survey. If you are working on designing or analyzing a survey and would like some assistance, please reach out to request your own consultation!


 Add a Comment

0 comments.

  Subscribe



Enter your e-mail address to receive notifications of new posts by e-mail.

  Archive



  Follow Us



  Facebook
  Twitter
  Instagram
  Back to Blog Home
This post is closed for further discussion.

Skip to main content

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
1350 Jefferson Park Avenue P.O. Box 800722
Charlottesville, VA 22908 (Directions)

facebook twitter instagram
© 2018 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
Copyright & Privacy
https://guides.hsl.virginia.edu/mln/blog/Quick-Tips-for-Survey-Design-via-Qualtrics
guides.hsl.virginia.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-22
159840
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VGBWKVTHKMJTPFY7QN4ZMOXT6LKBGYIC
<urn:uuid:be3a2346-73ca-4cad-ab0a-7968a2fef46e>
2019-05-22T12:58:22Z
18.233.50.128
text/html
sha1:5PZTOW6G6ZJJ746R2VIPKFA4UFEIGK6Z
<urn:uuid:fadac94d-8f6e-4aef-be47-6b30f2dafdb4>
https://guides.hsl.virginia.edu/mln/blog/Quick-Tips-for-Survey-Design-via-Qualtrics
response
<urn:uuid:ba0ec909-2ca7-4f73-93b0-d4cef789b75d>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-22
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-236-17-239.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/