Are you planning your online research? We have prepared a short guide for you, it will help you prepare and conduct a research project. Below you will find a seven-step approach that will help you manage online survey project.
- Define survey objective - decide what you need to learn. Survey objective should be clearly defined. If you define objective that will not be clear, you risk that your survey results also will be not clear and difficult to interpret.
- Define sample, on which you will conduct survey. Define who will participate in a survey and how big the research sample should be.
- Select survey method - the way you will conduct responses (direct interview, phone survey, online survey - www, social network, email, …). In our case, this will be an online survey.
- Create survey - create questionnaire with questions you will ask during research. An important rule is to select questions that will support medium you will use (survey method). For example, during a phone survey you won’t be able to show pictures, and during a web survey your respondents won’t be able to ask you a question “what do you mean exactly”. Therefore it is very important especially in case of online surveys to create clear questions and use the language (words) that is easy to understand. If you have any doubts if respondent will be able to understand world or abbreviation you use select another one more easy to understand.
- Test your survey - the last step of building a questionnaire is to test your survey on a small sample. Try to conduct your test on people with similar profiles to those that will participate in a survey.
- Conduct survey and collect responses - send your survey to selected group of respondents. Check your results and send a reminder only to those people that didn’t fill survey. Remember don’t send survey to people that already responded to your survey.
- Analyze results and create report - analyze collected responses and prepare a final report. Prepare and write down "lessons learned" from your survey project.