Hello All,

I wonder can you guys help me out...

1. I am considering distributing my surveys online and trying to decide which is the best online method to use survey monkey survey gizmo etc.?

2. My surveys need to be coded as some items can be quite intrusive, and want participants to feel they can answer their questionnaires honestly. Also, I will be gathering supervisors reports of these employees performance so, I need to match respondents surveys with their supervisors reports?

As a result I need to be able to identify through a coding process who each participant is, does anyone know if this is possible online?

do they have an employee or payroll number?

Having said that, asking for such data is like saying "I've got a way of cross referencing your employee number with your name" thus giving the impression that it is not anonymous.

Is the supervisor reports already written (i.e. part of their normal business and written for everyone) or are you going to their supervisors saying "these are the people that took part in the survey, please write reports on them"?

Hi Pink_numbers- thanks for getting in touch,

When i say 'anonymous' I guess I mean 'confidential' - basically the only person who will have access to surveys is me. A code will be allocated to each participant, I want to code their surveys so they will not have to enter their name on the survey.

Supervisors will also respond to a short questionnaire rating that employees performance and rate employees by name which will be sent directly to me via email. I need to match these pairs thus need to be able to enter a code on each online survey to link to the participating employee

The question is whether anyone knows if it is possible to code questionnaires for confidentially purposes through say survey gizmo or survey monkey?

Hi Pink_numbers- thanks for getting in touch,

When i say 'anonymous' I guess I mean 'confidential' - basically the only person who will have access to surveys is me. A code will be allocated to each participant, I want to code their surveys so they will not have to enter their name on the survey.

Supervisors will also respond to a short questionnaire rating that employees performance and rate employees by name which will be sent directly to me via email. I need to match these pairs thus need to be able to enter a code on each online survey to link to the participating employee

The question is whether anyone knows if it is possible to code questionnaires for confidentially purposes through say survey gizmo or survey monkey?

(I dont know why my post jumped ahead of yours there)

hey curiouscat. I'm using surveymonkey for a 360 appraisal. I have one survey for the self responses and one survey for the raters to rate that person, if that makes sense??

I just ask them for the name of the person they are rating on the raters' survey. But I suppose you could give people a number, and then ask them to distribute that amongst the people they want to be rated by. I write them a letter they then send on to the raters, with the link and all the study details in etc.

Survey monkey can be SSL encrypted for added security and I password protect my surveys.

You could even set up separate surveys for each participant (bit of a faff!)

Hey Sneaks,

It sound plausible then, originally I was going to do it hard-copy and mail out the pre-coded surveys however response rates can be poor on this method, Also, most of my participants would be engineers- thus likely to work from computer making the survey easier for them.

Could you recommend the best package to get from survey monkey? SELECT, GOLD or PLATINUM? Or what package have you used in your own research?
(I expect approximately 280 employees and naturally 280 supervisor reports of performance for those respondents.)

Thanks for getting back to me :-)

I nearly did hard copy surveys but decided that actually, they were less confidential than online (i.e. being left on peoples desks etc.) and if you email word forms out, then most companies have a policy where email is monitored - so its technically not confidential, because someone can monitor their emails and therefore their responses on your questionnaire.

I'm not sure which package I'm on, they've only introduced them. I think it cost about $9 a month. Although I know they now do an SPSS option which may be useful ? and I think you can only get that on the top package, you might want to have a look at what features you think you might need.

Hey friends some online survey giving opportunities to earn through affiliate.
Is this spam or true.

So, you have someone 'A' who is going to comment on x, y and z. You need a way of linking the comments of 'A' to the appropriate person. do they know this person will also be commenting on them? If so, then there should be no problem with asking them to put their name on them to start with, and then you can explain why you are requesting it, and that you will remove this when you have made the connection. The wording you use must be carefully thought through though, so that you don't give the participant the wrong idea of the amount of anonymity/confidentiality you can offer. With some things it is easy for others it is harder. For example most of my questionnaires were sent and received by e-mail, once they had been downloaded there is no way of linking the answers to the individual as there is no e-mail address, or any other distinguishing features on the main sections. However I have asked if some would be prepared to take part in further questions, so some have the info about their email on them, this is on a separate sheet which can be removed from the main questionnaire and stored in another file. The other problem is that the population I am sampling is small, and some comments could be linked with individuals, as could answers to a few of the questions, so these answers are going to have to be carefully aggregated. Similarly my supervisor has suggested that I quote from another source of information, but I have said no to this, as it could definitely identify individuals, which I do not want to do. If you are going to quote from your questionnaires, can you ensure confidentiality being 100% certain that the words will not be identifiable by anyone? There are a few journal articles that have used the internet for their research, some, I think, more ethically sound than others, and quite a good book, 'Internet communication and Qualitative Research' by Mann and Stewart, which might be useful.