Conducting Web-Based Surveys

ERIC Educational Reports, Dec 01, 2001 by David J. Solomon

The author has developed a set of software tools that provides many of the complex Web survey administration functions included in Web surveying packages(3). The software, Web Survey Mailer System (WSMS), is an integrated survey administration system that will send out personalized email cover letters, track which of the sampled people have completed the survey while keeping their responses anonymous and send out subsequent reminder emails to only those sampled people who have not responded to the survey. WSMS will block people who have not been sampled from accessing and responding to the survey and will keep respondents from submitting more than one set of survey responses. The system includes a customizable CGI script to capture the survey responses and place them in a tab-delimited ASCII database format that can easily be downloaded from the server and imported into a standard PC data base or statistical package. WSMS is written in PHP and uses the MySQL relational database to store information on the sampled people. Both PHP and MySQL are stable and powerful "open source" packages widely available on university and commercial Web servers and can be obtained free of charge in a variety of versions that will run on most common server operating systems. The WSMS scripts and documentation are available free-of-charge and can be downloaded from http://www.med-ed-online.org/rsoftware.htm#wsms SUMMARYInternet surveys are clearly going to continue to grow in popularity as the problems of coverage bias and unfamiliarity with the Internet subside. For the foreseeable future there will be people who will lack Internet access either by choice or circumstance though this will be less and less of an issue. Additionally the tools for conducting Web-based surveys will continue to grow in sophistication and ease of use as will our knowledge on how best to employ this survey methodology. At present researchers should use this technique with caution in carefully chosen populations and with an eye to learning as much as possible about how to do it better. NOTES1.In this paper we use the term "Internet survey" for both email and HTML form-based surveying while the term "Web-based survey" is reserved for HTML form-based surveys.

2.Cook, Heath, & Thompson (2000) included studies of both Web- and email-based surveys.

3.Detailed documentation for the Web Survey Mailer System is provided. However, installing and using these tools requires a good working knowledge of HTML and some background and understanding of server-based programming.

4.This Digest is based on an article first appearing in Practical Assessment Research and Evaluation REFERENCESBest, S.,J., Krueger, B., Hubbard, C. & Smith, A. (2001) An assessment of the generalizability of internet surveys. Social Science Computer Review, 19, 131-145.

Cook, C, Heath, F, & Thompson, R. (2000) A meta-analysis of response rates in web or Internet-based surveys. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 60, 821-836.

Couper, M.P., Blair, J. & Triplett T (1999) A comparison of mail and e-mail for a survey of employees in federal statistical agencies. Journal of Official Statistics, 15, 39-56.