Are you ready to run a survey for a class
of project, we've already got it written and ready to distribute?
But have you thought about the single best method for getting your
survey out and how privacy issues might affect your survey
responses?
Do you know how changing the distribution and privacy options for
your survey would alter the data?
Don't worry, we're here to help.
We will explain the basics about your choices for distributing surveys and we'll
show you some examples using Duke's comparable Qualtrics Survey Software.
You've probably already double checked that your survey design avoids
the classic pitfalls that would contaminate your data or make analysis
needlessly difficult like, you know the types and ranges of values
your data should return, you wrote simple clear questions, you avoided
binary agree/disagree,
and you didn't ask any questions that were too complicated or clearly biased.
If you would like to double check any of these, the friendly staff
at the connection bar of Duke Social Sciences Research Institute
can help you meet as many goals of good survey design as possible.
With all research involving human subjects, you need to make sure
that your work is being done in an ethical way that protects the
privacy of your participants. Luckily you don't need to re-invent
the wheel of ethics because Duke provides a lot of help for following
good ethics guidelines known commonly as IRB for the Institutional
Review Board.
We"ll get you started on the major things to think about but also
check out the link below to find out more.
Once the question design is set you need to get the survey out to your sample population, how do you figure out the
best option for distribution, both for getting quality data back
and respecting the privacy of your participants.
Or to think about this from a completely new direction.
Imagine that the survey is like planning a great party, we'll have
a lot of people coming and having fun, we need to figure out how
to balance having a great crowd and avoiding any
unanticipated problems.
Well when it comes to sending out surveys and keeping the results
private, it turns out that there are three main paths to pick from,
at the high privacy end of surveys the most common type of survey
distribution is the simple anonymous email link which provides the
easiest way to get most responses and give the most privacy for
respondents.
It's like hosting a costume party that's totally open to the public.
It's the easiest way to get a big crowd but nobody knows who anybody else.
Having a survey that's so open and anonymous also means that you
can't know who answered, nor what any particular person chose as
the response and you won't be able to detect if any respondents
distort your results by answering the survey multiple times but
when done well, it makes for easy data security.
If someone steals the laptop with the data for example, you're in
the clear in ethical grounds, the data is totally anonymous so no
amount of data crunching will let the thief identify specific people
from their survey responses.
Way at the opposite end of the distribution and security spectrum.
It can create individual email links for each respondent in your
sample pool and identify each of these individuals in the data.
This is like having a party where you require your guests to RSVP
and nobody there is wearing a costume.
You know exactly who is coming and you can identify by each individual
there.
These surveys require the most security work behind the scenes, but they
give you the most accurate information about who is responding because
each participant and response is identified to be a very specific
individual.
This means that you can build a richer data set and have the option
to do follow up interviews or questionnaires with these people over
time.
However, since you know exactly who is responding and exactly what
they said, this kind of survey requires the most effort into making
sure that the data is kept secure.
In between these two extremes, the option of distributing your survey
with individual email links, but keeping these responses anonymous
in the data, it'd be like having a costume party
With RSVPs, you know that certain people are in the room but you
can't actually figure out who any one person actually is.
This option for surveys allows you to identify that a particular
person is one of the participants but won't let you associate their
name with any of the particular data points thereby keeping their
answers anonymous.
This is the most flexible arrangement for distribution and security but it's not
completely free of ethical concerns, it may not be ethical for example
for a professor to keep tabs of which students in their class have
responded even if they can't identify any specific responses.
These three major options of distributing your survey, whether through
completely anonymous email links, identified email links and data, or
identified email links with anonymous data they are all possible with
Duke's Qualtric system and you can pick the best compromise for
your own research project.
There are a few quick questions you can ask yourself to help pick
among them, do you have a list of names and email addresses that
you wanna send the survey to?
If no, then go with the fully anonymous email link.
Are your participants your
students, employees or someone that you have authority over, if
yes then you might have to use a fully anonymous link .
Do you wanna send reminder emails or check for duplicate entries?
If yes you might want to identify distribution with anonymous responses.
Do you need to contact participants later in time and link those
responses to your initial data?
If you do, you need identified participants and identified results.
Do you need to link you survey responses to another data set?
If yes, then you need identified participants and identified results. 103 00:05:30,366 --> 00:00:00,000 So to summarize the three main options, [MUSIC]
Be sure to visit
your friends at accessorize connections bar help desk early in
the process to speed up and improve your survey success and security.
And check out the many helpful videos and helpful documentation
online that Qualtrics provides at Qualtrics University
So are you ready to go out and make the smart choice for a survey
distribution and privacy? 111 00:06:05,059 --> 00:00:00,000 That's the spirit. [MUSIC]