1. Best Practices: Survey Design

2. What is Survey Monkey?
 Survey Monkey is the world's leading provider
of web-based survey solutions.
 At Survey Monkey you can:
 Design a survey
 Collect results
 Perform an analysis based upon
results
 A free Survey Monkey account allows you to create
10 question surveys that up to 100 participants can
respond to.

3. Getting Started
 In order to construct, collect and analyze meaningful
data it helps to do the following:
 Consider your audience
 Be clear on what the survey subject is
 Group similar questions together and sequence the
survey in a manner that does not confuse the
participants
 Be specific with your questions
 Identify your goal

4. Tips for Survey Design
 When designing a survey have one specific goal
 Be certain you are choosing the right types of
questions; certain types cannot be analyzed
 Use sequencing: confusing and randomly ordered
questions can cause confusion and giving up on
answering the survey
 Break lengthy surveys into chunks and group similar
questions together
 A well organized survey makes it easier to analyze
results

5. Setting Goals: Design the Survey Accordingly
 Create your survey and give it a title
 Choose and create your questions carefully or you can let the Monkey
make suggestions
 Add the questions to the survey
 Send & deploying the survey to your audience. You can do this
 Create a generic web link URL you can use any way you'd like;
 Create a tracked email invitation that can only answered once;
 Embed your survey on your website using HTML;
 Post to your Facebook wall or use our Facebook app;
 Have your survey show up in a pop-up window when respondents
visit your site.

6. Setting Goals: Before Surveying, Consider Your
Criteria
 Decide how you want to analyze the data before creating the
survey. Do you want to filter by:
 Responses (e.g. by department, sex, course, etc.)?
 Properties like Response Dates, Email Address, IP Address,
Completed Response Only, etc.?
 Collectors (e.g. if you have more than one collector created
for survey distribution)?

7. Two Types of Questions:
Open and Closed-Ended
• Closed ended questions are direct questions that ask for
specific pieces of information from a client. They can be
answered with yes/no responses. By their nature they limit
the client's field of choice and length of response.
 Closed-ended questions can help to define a topic and the
open question can elicit more information on that topic. For
example "Do you have any children?" is a closed question
requiring a brief yes-no answer. If we follow that up with
"Tell me about them," we have given the client an open
invitation to start anywhere and say anything they want to
about their kids (Spillers, 2012).

8. The Open Ended Question
 An open-ended question, which is subjective (Horton, 2011)
cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no", or with a
specific piece of information, and which gives the person
answering the question scope to give the information that
seems to them to be appropriate. Open-ended questions are
sometimes phrased as a statement which requires a response.
Examples:
 Tell me about your relationship with your supervisor.
 How do you see your future?
 Tell me about the children in this photograph.
 What is the purpose of government?
 Why did you choose that answer?

9. Survey Monkey offers 16 formats of questions

10. Sequencing A Survey
 A good survey design should help to stimulate recall (if necessary);
it should motivate the respondent to reply; and the survey should
flow in an orderly fashion (Smart, n.d.). As a general guideline,
there are three areas regarding question sequence: opening
questions, question flow, and location of sensitive questions.
 Opening questions: The first few questions in the survey should be easy
and interesting in order to calm any participants suspicions about the
survey’s integrity. This allows the participants to build up confidence in the
survey’s objective. In return, this may stimulate their interest and overall
participation (Iraossi 2006, 74-78).
 Question flow: The question sequence in the survey body should take on a
flow of ideas and be geared towards the respondents’ abilities. After you
have established the first general topic, all related questions should come
up before a second topic is raised.

11. Sequencing A Survey (cont.)
• Location of sensitive questions - some suggest that sensitive
questions should not be included at the beginning of the
survey. However, there are no set rules on this.
• If you do include sensitive questions at the beginning of the
survey, then you may run into respondents rejecting the
survey and exiting early. They may not have built up
confidence yet in the survey’s integrity quite so early.
• Questions like demographics or personal information are
usually best to introduce towards the end of the survey. This
way, respondents are likely to have already developed
confidence in the survey’s objective (Iraossi 2006, 74-78).

12. Collecting Feedback/Getting Survey Responses
 You’ll need to select a collector: a collector is what generates the
link to your survey, and it also determines the distribution method.
 You can choose one or multiple collectors; the more you choose the
wider your survey will be disseminated. Survey Monkey offers five
types of collectors:
 Web Link Collector : The link you send in your own email or post on
your web page is called the Web Link Collector. This generates a
single, anonymous survey link that you will be able to distribute
yourself.
 Email Collector: With the Email Invitation collector, you upload your
email addresses into our system, customized your invitation
message, schedule the delivery. The Monkey distributes a a unique
tracking link to each recipient on your list. You can track who
responds, managing opt outs, send out reminder messages to those
who have not yet responded, and organize your email list by status.

13. Collecting Feedback/Getting Survey Responses (cont.)
 Facebook Collector: Take advantage of social networking by inviting
your friends on Facebook to take your survey. Place a survey link on
your own wall's news feed and your friends' feeds, or embed a
survey directly on your page.
 Website Survey Collector: You can embed your survey on your
website or display it in a popup window. You can specify the popup
configuration that you want and we generate a link that includes all
of the back end code to make your popup behave according to your
settings. All you need to do is copy and paste this into your web
page code.
 Targeted Audience Collector: Using the "Buy a Targeted Audience"
collector type (Currently only available to U.S. based customers),
you can purchase survey responses from U.S. based respondents
who meet your chosen demographic criteria.

14. How To Analyze Survey Results
 There are five different ways to analyze survey results:
 Viewing Survey Responses: The responses for each page are
saved and displayed in the analyze section after respondents
click the navigation button and successfully advance to the next
survey page.
 Filter Survey Responses: Filtering allows you to organize and
view subsets of data for advanced analysis. Filtered data will
display only the set of full responses that match your filter
criteria, allowing you to find patterns in your data more easily.
 Crosstab Survey Responses: Cross-tabulated data is useful for
showing a side by side comparison of how respondents
answered a particular question compared to the remaining
questions they answered and determine how they are
interrelated. The result is a table of the results, each column
representing the group of respondents who selected a particular
answer choice for the comparison question you selected.

15. How To Analyze Survey Results (cont.)
 Download Responses: You can download the responses you've
collected at any time (yes, even while you are still receiving
responses) with a professional plan.
 Share Responses: Sharing Responses enables you to provide
direct access to a specific set of survey results without giving
access to your account. With this feature, you can control how
much detail to share by choosing between a variety of access
level settings.

16. Questions about Survey Monkey?
For signing up, selecting account type or updating your
information visit Survey Monkey at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/home/
For detailed tutorials and links to help you build the
survey of your dreams please go to this link:
http://help.surveymonkey.com/

17. References:
Horton, W. (2011). Chapter 5: Tests. In E-Learning by design (2nd ed., pp. 215-284).
Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Iarossi, G. (2006). The Power of Survey Design: A User's Guide for Managing Surveys,
Interpreting Results, and Influencing Respondents. Washington, D.C.: The World
Bank.
Open and closed-ended questions. (n.d.). Pew Research Center for People & Press.
Retrieved June 22, 2013, from www.people-press.org/
Smart survey design. (n.d.). Survey Monkey Help Center. Retrieved June 22, 2013, from
http://s3.amazonaws.com/SurveyMonkeyFiles/SmartSurvey.pdf
Spillers, C. S., Ph.D. (2012). Closed-ended questions. University of Minnesota Deluth.
Retrieved June 22, 2013, from
http://www.d.umn.edu/~cspiller/csd8235/listeningpractice/closedquestions.htm
Survey design best practices. (n.d.). Survey Monkey Help Center. Retrieved June 22,
2013, from http://help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/Design-Tips-How-tocreate-and-administer-effective-surveys