Hello again. I'm considering using online questionnaires (perhaps using surveymonkey or similar) to collect data from a group of people associated with my field of study. While there is plenty of information in the usual textbooks and guides for conducting social research, most of this relates to paper and/or posted questionnaires and maximising response rates that way.

I was wondering whether anyone might be able to help me locate recent published writing, perhaps in the journals or elsewhere in print, that might give some guidance about online questionnaires, and how to maximise response rates etc., in specific consideration of the advantages and disadvantages offered by doing them online.

Many thanks!

There was an article recently in the 'psychologist' - a member only publication which suggested incentive snowball sampling for online questionnaires. So you don't get the incentive to complete it, but to pass it on to 10 other people or something. This may combat the problem of people completing it just to get the incentive meaning you will get a load of rubbish data where everyone has just put neutral neutral neutral.

I am just not sure how you would go about recording who passed it on and who didn't.

My incentive for mine is £150 amazon voucher for one lucky respondent haha. I would recommend survey monkey but the only thing I have found is that it can't do piping - that is, if you want to use details they have inputted in q1 in a question later on, you can't.

I used this method to collect data. there is a book 'Internet communication and qualitative research: a handbook for researching online' Mann, C and Stewart, F. (2000) London: Sage, which you might find useful. Plus articles: Coomber, R. (1997) Using the internet for survey research. Sociological research online, 2 (2). Huff, C. and Rosenberg, J. (1989) The on-line voyeur: Promises and pitfalls of observing electronic interaction. Behaviour research methods, instruments and computers 21 (2), 166-172. Watt, J. (1997) using the internet for quantitative survey research. Quirks marketing research review, July. not just about questionnaires, but also about other things you need to think about. there are others which you should be able to find using things like swetswise to track them down

there are many pitfalls to online questionnaires, some of which did not apply to mine because of the group that I was targetting, but which could be important if you are going to make a broad sweep of possible sources. my group we on a closed sites, so I knew that all the participants were genuine, - which is a very important point - and I had been, and still am a member of the groups. You need to think aobut how you are going to colect the data, how you are going to make sure the questionnaire arrives in a suitable form, for example I knew that I could not include any pics because they would have been screened out by the net nannies of my participants location. You have to make sure you can preserve anonymity etc. so lots to think about

:-)

I have this book - if you would like it just PM me. :-)

If you do use SM - please make sure you set it up correclty and do a few pilot runs. There are so many people in my department that finish their data collection and then realise they have unuseable data because they set it up badly

Thanks for all of the above... and sorry for taking so long to get back here. I think I can source most of the above but I may return for more help if I have trouble getting hold of them. (up)(up)

Before you consider using Survey Monkey, consider using Adobe Lifecycle to make a questionnaire and then solicit and e-mail it to contacts - I used this method and found it to be very successful in the end. PM me if you wish for more details.